


Redemption (Part II)

by spnredemption



Series: Redemption Road [41]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2012-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:56:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spnredemption/pseuds/spnredemption
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Love is stronger than death…</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redemption (Part II)

**Author's Note:**

> **Masterpost:** **[Supernatural: Redemption Road](http://spn-redemption.livejournal.com/1552.html)** (for full series info,  
>  warnings, and disclaimer)  
>  **Authors:** [](http://swordofmymouth.livejournal.com/profile)[**swordofmymouth**](http://swordofmymouth.livejournal.com/) and [](http://zatnikatel.livejournal.com/profile)[**zatnikatel**](http://zatnikatel.livejournal.com/)  
>  **Characters/Pairing:** Dean/Castiel, Sam, OC and canon characters  
>  **Rating:** R (this part)  
>  **Wordcount:** ~27,000  
>  **Warnings:** language, violence, sexuality, references to cutting  
>  **Betas:** [](http://dotfic.livejournal.com/profile)[**dotfic**](http://dotfic.livejournal.com/) and [](http://murron.livejournal.com/profile)[**murron**](http://murron.livejournal.com/)  
>  **Art:** Chapter banners by [](http://zatnikatel.livejournal.com/profile)[**zatnikatel**](http://zatnikatel.livejournal.com/); digital paintings by **[Euclase](http://euclase.deviantart.com)** , and **[Rinienne](http://rinienne.deviantart.com)** , which you can also find **[here](http://spn-redemption.livejournal.com/49488.html)** and **[here](http://spn-redemption.livejournal.com/49165.html)** , and [](http://ryuu_artist.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://ryuu_artist.livejournal.com/)**ryuu_artist**

The railroad crossing where Jake Talley finally succumbed to Azazel's temptation is exactly where Carver Edlund's gospels said it would be, and Castiel slows the Impala down as she crests the raised iron rails, stares ahead at empty prairie land. _Fifty miles thataway_ , Azazel had told the luckless Talley, and a knot of anticipation is tying itself ever tighter inside Castiel as he forges on through the snow.

The graveyard is colorless and desolate, iron gate hanging on its frame, dead and diseased trees pointing hopelessly up at the sky. The crypt is dead center, incongruously grand and stately among the weathered stone monuments and worn, lopsided wooden crosses that are scattered around it, and Castiel eyes it curiously as he pushes up out of the driver's seat. There is no sign of it ever having opened, but Castiel knows that it did, knows that it loosed a multitude of demons into the world. He knows that John Winchester emerged through it too, knows that Azazel met his end here; and there to his left is the solid bulk of the monument Dean slumped against while he raised the same gun Castiel has gripped in his fist.

He crosses to stand in front of the tomb. Its front is ornate, the sheen of the inlaid silver devil's trap that seals it bright in the pearly gray of dawn, and its sheer presence is forbidding, but Castiel is undeterred. He sinks down to kneel in front of the crypt, placing the Colt on the earth beside him. He brushes dirt and leaves away from the step that forms the threshold to Hell, slips Dean's jacket down off of his shoulders, feeling the frigid air bite into the skin of his arms. He breathes deep and steady as he reaches inside himself, drawing on his grace as economically as he can. His sword coalesces with an effort that leaves him gasping and off-balance for a full minute. He braces himself on the ground with one hand as he reels and blinks through the chaotic whirl of trees and monuments, until the world rights itself again, and then he doesn't hesitate any longer.

He slices his blade across the flesh of his inner arm so that blood shining luminous with grace wells up and oozes thickly through the lips of the slash. He whispers out the words of the ritual that will hold the horrors of the Pit inside the open gate as he journeys, daubing sigils and runes across the step, the _Claves Angelicae_ : the forty-eight angelic keys. It's powerful magic, old magic, magic with a _k_ ; the magic of the _Liber Logaeth_ , the Book of the Speech of God, and nothing demonic will get past the barrier the symbols form.

Castiel pushes up, the Colt gripped tight in his fist, ignoring the bloody rivulets that trickle down his wrist and hand and drip thickly from his fingertips.

For a moment he stares at the devil's trap, but he feels no doubt. _It should have been me_ , he thinks.

He reaches to slot the gun into the keyhole, turns it sharply right, and steps back.

For a moment there is only stillness and silence. And then Castiel hears it: the creak of gears shifting laboriously into a rhythm, a clanking as the inner and outer circles of the seal begin to turn, slow at first and then more rapidly. Its sound is a clarion call, he knows, and already he can hear the far-off whisper of realization, a susurration that builds to a doubtful whine and then a gleeful howl as the ground underneath him begins to tremble with the restless anticipation of damned souls impatient to escape their prison.

Gripping the hilt of his sword even tighter, Castiel backs away slowly as the doors begin to grind open. He can already smell the fetid stench he remembers so well seeping out through the gap, the smell of burning meat; and the ashy heat of demons bombarding the portal blasts out at him, sending him reeling back against the Impala. Their screech and cry is earsplitting now, and Castiel raises his sword, braces himself to take on any that might breach the portal as the clamor becomes a fretful wail of disappointment and rage when they are thwarted by the runes.

They mill about aimlessly on the other side for long moments, plumes and puffs of oily black smoke that leap and billow, before they start to recede. As they clear, Castiel expects to see what the Winchesters saw when they stared into the abyss.

It isn't what the Winchesters saw, not according to the Prophet's version of events.

It isn't what Castiel remembers either, not from the first time he descended to redeem the Righteous Man, or the second time he ranged even deeper, to the solitary outer darkness where the Cage was.

Neither is it the same as Crowley's remodeled _foyer_ , the bland front entrance to the demon's take-a-number-and-step-right-up torture chamber, with its endless waiting line.

Beyond the yawning maw of the portal there is a cracked and broken black top, bisected by a double yellow line. It stretches into infinity, into a far-off point on a sunset-red horizon, like the many highways Castiel has driven with the Winchesters in the Impala. Almost as he thinks it, he feels the nudge of the car on his thigh, places his hand on her to soothe her. And there it is again, that low-level current that blazes up through his fingers and casts his skin silvery-blue, and it is _significant_ ; and only now, as he focuses back on the road to nowhere, the road to _somewhere_ , does he begin to understand what it might mean.

"You want to come with me to bring him home," Castiel murmurs, and he can feel her sigh under his palm. He smiles, remembers Dean's advice, _treat my baby right, and she'll be real good to you_. He dips his fingers in the blood on his arm, methodically inscribes the angelic keys on the metal shell of the car, a daisy chain of symbols to shield her as they travel. Once done, he swallows, looks up at the big sky. "You brought me back twice," he says. "Let it be for this. Please."

Castiel steps back up to the open mausoleum, reaches to pull the Colt out of the keyhole, and wedges it into the waistband of his jeans as he heads back to slide into the car. He slams the door, cranks her up, drowns out any trepidation with the rev of the engine as he pushes his foot against the pedal and is rewarded with a satisfying growl. The mark on his chest burns in reply, and when he rubs his hand over it, he thinks he feels it like embers beneath his skin. _Son, don't do this_ , he can hear in his head, and it's as if Bobby is right next to him, but when he glances down he sees a red outline, a fiery glow that seeps out through the cotton of his t-shirt in the shape of Dean's handprint. "I'm coming, Dean," he breathes, and he ignores the howled chorus of distant hellhounds.

Castiel remembers how he folded his wings tight to himself and dove into the inferno before, he and his brothers in attack formation, accelerating arrow-straight and beset by demons. And surely this moment of passing from world to underworld again should be equally climactic even if his mode of transport is infinitely more mundane, but it's no different than going through a highway interchange at a toll booth, as the Impala slips effortlessly through a slot she is too wide to fit and her tires crunch across the border into the landscape of Hell.

Up closer the route looks like nothing more than a dilapidated road with weeds growing up through its cracks, and as he looks ahead of him Castiel raises his hand to his mouth, chews meditatively on a knuckle. He knows that human philosophers have long dwelt on the concept of Hell, pondered on what its perceived quality is, theorized over whether it is literal or whether it is a state of consciousness, a spiritual condition caused by separation from God. But its fires are real and eternal, he has felt them himself. This is just the beginning, he knows. He must push further, and perhaps in a while he will be surrounded by all the familiar mosaics of Hell: the fire, the brimstone, the _usual_. Or was that simply the Hell he knew as an angel, instead of the hybrid he is now?

Too much thinking, and he shakes his head, punches the radio, and static comes in. "No," he decides sharply, because he wants music to drown out his thoughts and he wants it now, _dammit_.

He thumps the dashboard with a fist, and suddenly the radio chirrups and a transmission breaks through. According to Bobby there hasn't been radio since things fell apart and Castiel knows there isn't radio in Hell, even if Crowley's piped _Blue Danube_ might still be playing as the late, unlamented King's endless line shuffles forward before looping back on itself. And that wasn't even proper radio, not like the station that Dean tunes into when he's holed up at the back of Singer Salvage with the guts of a classic car scattered around him on the floor of Bobby's auto shop, sorting out replacement parts for his baby.

No, they don't have that kind of radio in Hell.

Only now it seems they do, as a voice filters in through the static and magnifies.

Castiel doesn't know the song or the singer, but he lets it play because it sounds like the kind of thing Dean would listen to during their long drives through rustbelt cities and one-horse towns, through suburbs and abandoned places back in the world; along roads just like this one, because they all look the same at midnight, under the silver of moonglow. There's an hour when the dew hits and mist creeps up from the ground, and this is what Castiel drives through now, taking his time at a sedate forty miles per hour. He can make out stars revolving above through the trees, and from time to time he thinks he sees a face in the mist, a figure, but just as he draws closer it dissipates like a mirage.

He keeps his hands steady on the wheel and time stretches on like the road, and the road is long, so long that Castiel believes hours might pass while the radio plays in the background of the humming engine with the needle balanced over the red line, reading E. He doesn't know how the car keeps driving. It just does.

He finds himself falling asleep behind the wheel, thinks, _highway hypnosis_ , and recalls Dean telling him about it on a long, meandering drive through deep-south humidity, Sam tucked in the backseat, snoring and drooling onto the leather.

_Between the vibration of the engine and that syncopated line, you just fall asleep_ , Dean warns him again inside his head. _So you have to be smarter than that, keep yourself aware, awake. Just that moment of comfort can cost you everything._

Castiel rolls down the window to feel the bite of wind in his face, and he turns the music up. He remembers what Dean taught him but he wonders if any of it is really relevant in this place where the road doesn't end, doesn't curve, doesn't meet with crossroads or intersections, but just goes on, and on, and on.

From dim memory, Castiel can hear the ghosts of conversations past, voices traded during midnight rides between cities and motels, Dean earnest, because it meant something to him, saving people, hunting things.

_You feel yourself drifting. You want to pull over and grab some sleep and yeah, sometimes that's what we do. But I don't like that. Someone's waiting for us, you know? There's families out there, people in need, and if we don't get there, they could be on some vamp's dinner menu. Or a werewolf's. Or just a garden-variety haunting._

Castiel supplies his part of the conversation softly, like he had back then. "How do you deal with it?"

_Don't fall asleep. Don't stop. Don't give up. I keep the faces of everyone I ever helped on a hunt with me. They keep me on the road._

Castiel reaches up to adjust the rearview mirror and he catches the familiar pattern of leather seating and then the smooth lines of Dean's shirt, his muscles flattening the fabric with their pressure and his easy slouch as he sinks into the vintage upholstery. He occupies it like he was born in the car. _Just keep your eyes on the road_ , he instructs with a casual wave of his hand, as he scans the verge that races past. _I got it under control. This is the way through_.

Castiel fakes a derisive snort. "Do you have a road map for Hell back there?"

Dean smiles, the slow curl of his lips sensuous, and his eyes are iridescent in the pale orange sodium lights that dot the endless highway.

_I can do you one better, buddy boy. We can try GPS_.

Castiel smiles back, whispers, "We aren't in the world anymore, Dean."

Dean winks, a fold of green. _Not the Global Positioning System. Get with the program, sport. It's the Gabriel Positioning System down here_.

Castiel inhales, and only now does he realize just how heavy the atmosphere of comfort that surrounds Dean is; how even Dean's phantom presence arouses every latent memory of love, and joy, and ease, even as it scores him through with grief. Heat blazes out from the scar on his chest and he presses his hand to it, stifles a cry as another familiar voice echoes deep inside his head, calling his name. It sounds like Sam but Sam isn't here, and Castiel finds it easy to ignore because Dean's face is rippling like water swirling down a drain, and now Gabriel's face is in its place, his eyes crinkling and his grin crooked and snarky. In his hand is a Pepsi can, and Castiel can make out the beads of condensation dripping onto his fingers where he grips it.

_What, you didn't miss me, brother?_ Gabriel taunts, and there in the background is Sam again, _Cas, come on_ , almost as if he means to ground Castiel in reality.

"You're not real," Castiel says, his disappointment welling bitterly. "Neither was Dean. It's just…Hell. Like echoes of all of you. Like ghosts in a haunted house."

_We could be real…_

"Or you could be here to lead me astray."

_Clever boy!_ his brother declares with a wink. _But why on earth would we do that, Cas? I mean, we don't want you to leave. We want you to stay. Forever and ever. And wasn't that the plan from the get-go? You were supposed to be here with the rest of us. Your smackdown with the Beast was supposed to be a one way voyage on Lake of Fire Cruises, but you let boy-hero take the fall_.

The radio crackles through _Paint It Black_ , and then the _Keith fuckin' Richards, hell yeah_ guitar riff fades into a sugar-sweet harmony, _she's got a ticket to ride, and she don't care_ , before static crackles again. Castiel hisses, turns the dial left and right, then left again, until the volume peeters out and all they are left with is the faint rumble of the engine and the vibration of the struts as they float aimlessly across the blacktop like a ship adrift at sea. Behind him, his brother scoffs again, _are those tears?_ and Castiel's frustration sears like inflammation, the patience he used to know so well and exercise with Dean lost somewhere on this odyssey. "I'm not human, not completely," he snaps, although he's not entirely sure if he's speaking to himself or the grinning apparition in the back seat. He swabs the wetness away from his eyes. "I don't cry. So if you've come for tears, go somewhere else."

_Oh, you'll cry_ , Gabriel assures him, and his jocularity is gone. _Especially if you think you can use it to put out a fire. A lake full of it_. He leans back in the seat and laces his hands behind the back of his neck, as though he's reclining in a hammock with an ice-cold six pack at his feet, and he smirks. _What is your plan, anyway short-bus? Don't you know how this road works?_

"You're not real," Castiel persists. "I'm in the car alone and I'm arguing with myself."

_I thought that was Sam's job_ , Gabriel points out, and suddenly his face is a twisting mire of flesh tones and facial structures, and his face pulls into Sam's familiar expression of gentle compassion, his listening face, the deep hazel of his eyes softening with every tale of woe, as though he takes on each stranger's sorrow for his own. Castiel wonders if that was a quality burned into him from the night his mother died onward, for all of time, as Sam's lips form words, pleading, _Cas, come on, man_.

Castiel pulls his eyes away from the mirror. "You're not Sam, either."

_Well, what's a guy gotta do to get you to trust him?_

Not-Sam shifts so he sits up in the seat, and he laces the fingers of both hands over his heart as he begins to sing, an alto of surprising strength, _close your eyes, give me your hand, darling, can you feel my heart beating? Do you understand, do you feel the same? Am I only dreaming, or is this burning—_

Caught out, and Castiel is triumphant. "Dean doesn't like that song, and Sam has better taste."

_Don't talk shit about the Bangles, idjit!_

Sam's long hair is gone, eyes shadowed by a threadbare baseball cap whose team insignia has faded beneath the force of a South Dakota sun. Bobby is as weathered as the tombstones that jutted haphazardly out of the soil in Colt's cemetery, sand-blasted by years of hunting, and he's typically stern and forbidding as he waggles a finger and lectures Castiel.

_Dean used to sing that song to Sam to make him laugh and forget about what dear old sainted John Winchester was up to in the middle of the night with a forty-five and a prayer_.

"Actually, that sounds like something Dean would do," Castiel admits.

_Maybe he'd tell you himself, but you won't turn up the volume_.

"Is that supposed to be a hint?"

Bobby sighs and then winks out like a light.

The radio snaps on again, and suddenly a woman is singing about clouds in her coffee, clouds in her coffee, and how Castiel is so vain he probably thinks the song is about him. _It's a distraction_ , he tells himself; all of it is, distractions he doesn't need. Or perhaps this is a Hell of his own making, like those philosophers posited, a change in perception fueled by his waning grace and impending humanity. How many transmutations will it take, from angel to human and back again, from angel to God to this mongrel he is now, before the world as he knows it begins to look unrecognizable, before _he_ is unrecognizable? _Will Dean know it's me?_ he thinks frantically, and the hard smack of his palm onto his scar is purely instinctive.

When Castiel's fingers fall into the familiar grooves of Dean's handprint, he thinks that for an instant the thrum of the road and this eternal midnight falter. There is a flash like a spark that reminds him of that night in Pontiac, when he strode through the barn doors and the lights blew out above him in a thousand pinpricks of light. But then there is nothing but a brief flare of flame that erupts between his fingertips before it dies again, and if there was a connection between him and Dean, screaming for Castiel from the heart of Hell, it is gone.

Castiel chokes out terror, has to force himself to breathe deep and keep his free hand steady on the wheel and his eyes on the road. _Not now, soldier_ , Balthazar breathes in his ear, for he is a traitor too and he burns with Dean in the Lake of Fire. _You don't leave anyone behind_. Castiel shakes his brother out of his head, focuses on his quest, but the fear that he might not succeed still seethes fitfully inside him. "It doesn't work," he whispers. "Dean, the link doesn't work. How am I going to find you if it doesn't work?"

He turns on the high beams as he careens along, pushes the pedal down until it grinds into the floor. The Impala races faster, Castiel's hands tighten on the wheel, and somewhere in this exhausting anxiety he drifts without thought as the hours turn into days.

Castiel sees the boy standing on the roadside at the last minute and almost clips him as he hauls the steering wheel to his left so that the big car fishtails clumsily, her tires tearing up grass and dirt as she skids to a halt. He peers up at the rearview mirror as the boy turns around, and he gasps, his eyes widening with his astonishment.

He's already leaning over to pull the handle and push open the door as the boy comes trotting up the shoulder, and as he draws close Castiel can make out the awkward sway of his arms poking through the sleeves of his black shirt and grass stains on a pair of old, unwashed jeans. He grabs the open door with one hand, stares in, and what Castiel sees steals his breath away.

"Dean," he croaks, his voice sandpaper rough because his throat has seized up from the long weeks of silence since Bobby flickered and vanished.

"Nope. I'm Vassago," the boy answers as he all but dives in, gangling arms and legs everywhere at once. He slides across the leather and looks over the interior of the car as though he's inspecting it to his satisfaction.

Castiel hasn't seen Dean for all the long weeks since he first drove the Impala through the portal, but he has known Dean down through his skin to his very molecules, through every hidden memory and every thought, both intimate and objective, and the teenager sitting beside him in the car is Dean. There's no mistaking it, even though the name he offers rings a distant alarm bell that clangs _not_ , and even though Castiel can vaguely hear Sam's voice of reason cutting through it all from far away, _Dean isn't here, Cas…_

"Word is you're looking for this Dean guy," Vassago offers nonchalantly, and he winks in a way that stabs Castiel in the heart as he reaches across to clunk the passenger door shut.

"Have you seen him?" Castiel manages. "Do you know where he is?"

Vassago snorts. "Don't you know?"

_Riddles_ , and Castiel blinks. "No. Where is he? Please…tell me."

"Look," Vassago says, and he sidles closer to Castiel with a glance around the wilderness, as though someone might overhear them, before he leans in conspiratorially. "Did you think to check the car before you started riding off every which way and getting your damn fool self lost?"

Castiel frowns, searches the boy's green eyes, with their stitchings of brown, and he is so hungry to find Dean's soul shining inside them that he has to make himself pull back and consider that what he is dealing with is not human. This thing beside him in the car is playing on his heartstrings by wearing the face of someone he loves so fiercely that he will lose all sense of purpose and direction if he doesn't make an effort to remain detached. But oh, it is so hard. "Come on," he dares finally. "I have no patience for your games."

After a snort, the boy rolls his eyes. "Jeez, try the trunk, man. Isn't that where Dean keeps everything he needs?"

Castiel opens the door in an unthinking, desperate scramble, and pounds down the asphalt. The trunk lid creaks loudly as it yawns wide open, and he thinks abstractedly that Dean would grease the hinges, that they will do it together when they get back. Moonlight fills the trunk and plays across the usual weapons bag, still open from when Castiel retrieved the Colt, and Castiel stares into it as though something will miraculously reveal itself.

Nothing does.

He scrubs a hand through his hair, yells, "There's nothing here!" and his voice echoes mockingly, _nothing-nothing-nothing_ , so that he snaps his head around and gazes out across the flatlands.

The Impala's headlights cast an eerie beam across the landscape, barren but for deformed trees whose branches twist and gnarl to form sigils against a glutinous mist. Outside of the safe confines of the car, this new version of Hell is even more desolate and hostile, and Castiel senses the malevolence of the place pressing in against him. He can feel it sliding across his bare arms, feel its cold caress at the nape of his neck where Dean likes to nuzzle warmth into his skin, feel it seeping into his pores, a creeping infection that might taint him forever now that the immunity of his grace is weakened. He has fought on myriad fields of glory through his long existence, but this place is ancient, frigid evil, and its chill sends dread coursing through him, making him long for the warm, red glow of torture he remembers from before. And _move_ , he needs to keep moving and not stare into the wasteland, but when he tears his eyes away from it and steps to the side of the car to squint in through the quarterlight window and repeat, "There's nothing here," the shotgun seat is empty.

In the next second Castiel hears the crunch of a boot on a scree of stone and grit, turns to find that Vassago is behind him. And child-Dean is gone, replaced by a hulking giant, rake-thin and sinewy, with onyx eyes and skin like coffee with a splash of half and half.

The giant grins, flashing a row of sharpened teeth. "There will be," he says, and his fist is the last thing Castiel sees.

Castiel comes round to the taste of blood in his mouth, and it is half so bitter as the aftertaste of regret. He thinks it was a stupid trick, a ruse he should have seen coming a mile away; thinks that Dean would have known.

He jounces with every imperfection in the pavement, hears the rush of momentum beneath him as the wheels press hot rubber over ground, and an array of weapons clunking against each other under the false bottom of the trunk and inside the weapons duffel he is curled against. He has an arsenal at his disposal and no way to reach it, tied and trussed as he is, like a pig ready to be spit-roasted.

He strains at the cords that wind around his wrists and hands and cut cruelly into his flesh, mouths at the duct tape Vassago slapped over his face and tastes its bitter glue with a curse. _How long have we been on this road?_ he thinks desperately, as he squirms against the rough surface of the trunk interior.

_How much time has passed?_

He thinks that it has been days.

He suspects that it could be weeks.

He worries that it could be months.

"Try years!" Vassago sings out from the front, and his voice slithers silkily through the back of the bench seat like a snake in the grass, before the sound of radio static snaps on and grows louder, cutting in and out through snatches of music until it settles and the sound of a guitar riff filters through to the trunk.

Castiel hears it only vaguely, beguiled by the notion that years might have passed for him down here even though it should come as no surprise after the four decades he spent here the first time, decades that added up to mere months back in the world. The second time he had been newly minted and stronger, raised at the hand of God, or so he thought, and the journey to the Cage and back had taken much less time.

He finds himself pondering his aimless drift through the wasteland before the demon waylaid him, and he considers his perception that this is not the Hell he knows, that this Hell is different. It has been stripped bare in the absence of Lilith and Alastair, without Crowley's iron hand at the tiller and the threat of Lucifer's return looming large. This Hell has been left to decay and ruin, and its miasma of atrophy befuddles and confounds his mind, spins his sense of direction until he has lost his true north. Everything is ephemeral, even memories he thought would be etched in stone. What is the name of the old man whose eyes soften when he thinks Castiel isn't looking, the man who offered him a home and calls him _son_ , and what is the name of the man's dog? Who is the child he can see in his mind's eye, the girl with eyes like his own? And who is the pearl-skinned demon he kissed despite being repulsed by the misshapen, unholy fiend that roiled beneath her human veneer, the one who called him… _what did she call him_? Not his name, and that seems fitting because he can't recall what her name is.

They are important, he knows, but their identities are lost to him.

If he spent enough time here, trapped in this place, would he soon forget Sam too?

And would he forget _Dean_ , the tidal pull of him, the longing of both separation _and_ proximity? Would he forget the stolen kisses, the torrid nights, the way his bold, brash lover becomes something soft and tender in the dark, the way he gazes at Castiel through half-lidded, lust-dazed eyes as he worships him with tongue, teeth, trailing hands and teasing fingertips? Would he forget that Dean loves him, would he forget how Dean felt under him and around him as Castiel claimed him for his own?

Castiel suspects that given enough time, nothing withstands the amnesiac eternity that shapes this new Hell.

_Years, has it been years?_ he marvels again, and he finds himself wondering why he came at all. He tries to navigate through this dementia that has cast his recollection in murky fog, searches through the ragged holes in his memory to find the reason for his quest.

_I'm looking_ , he thinks. _I'm looking… looking for…_

And he spends a long time trying to recall the name of the thing he lost that he wanted back so badly, but can no longer remember.

The road goes on. And on. And _on_.

There is a wound on Castiel's chest that burns, and when he looks down he can see it glowing red through his t-shirt, but he doesn't know how it got there or what it means. When he seeks within himself for the remaining shreds of his grace to aid him, there is no weight to his light and energy; both are spent, dissipated, leaking from him like marrow from a smashed bone. Whatever is left isn't substance enough to fight back with, so he lets go with a sigh, starts to sing to himself softly, a song someone he can't put a name or face to taught him, _hey Jude, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better_ , as he waits for the road to end.

And then an incredible thing happens.

The car stops.

Castiel wriggles like a worm, all invertebrate muscle and no bones or joints, twisting onto his back so he faces the opening of the trunk, and in his head he is going over every scenario, how to thrust his bound legs out heels-first, into Vassago's face to knock him backwards; how he will scramble to escape and cut himself free. Will he have to kill Vassago first? Castiel digs in with his awkward, clasped, immobile hands and listens, breathes in the Impala's sweat, and it smells like motor oil and gasoline.

A door opens and slams closed. Castiel hears muffled speech and there is more than one voice, the lilt of a woman speaking, and then another. He lists to the side, pushing his ear against the metal of the wheel well. The voices are low but he recognizes Vassago's baritone, and then an uptick in the conversation as it becomes more heated. Words filter through.

"Tweedledemon, I suggest you get back to wherever you came from—"

"Oooh, he's gettin' testy now."

"I'm the crown prince of twenty-six legions of demons, Tweedledumber. This means I'm not to be trifled with."

"You used to be a nice guy, Vassago. I know that ain't your car."

"I bought it. Fair and square."

Castiel kicks out and screams as best he can behind the barrier of duct tape. He tastes plastic as he kicks again, all feet and knees crashing against metal, until he pauses and listens to the silence from outside.

"Oh, that? That's nothing."

"Sounds like something, all right. You got contraband? You know we can't let you smuggle, Vassago. Rules is rules."

Vassago clears his throat loudly. "You really ought to treat me with more respect than that."

"We don't trust rats. And we know you dabble with those mudmonkey souls more than you should. So why don't you open the trunk and show us what you got?"

Castiel stills and listens to the scuffle and scrape of feet over gravel and dirt. The footsteps pause before the trunk catch, and he hears the sound of Vassago fumbling with the keys, and then the grating sound of metal shifting as the trunk opens.

Moonlight pours in, and Castiel scents brimstone on the air, but he has only a second to appreciate the view of the night stars and the inverted Milky Way scattered above before Vassago stands above him, bisecting his view of the pinprick lights and the sinister forest surrounding them. Beyond Vassago are the twisted faces of low-grade demons, their darkened skin bubbled and raw in their true forms, the withered remains of the humans they began life as barely apparent.

Castiel cries out behind his duct tape gag, cringing deeper into the trunk.

"Lookit that shit! He's smuggling a fuckin' angel in! Holy shit…"

Vassago does a funny thing, then. He winks at Castiel, his eyes flaring yellow for a fraction of a second. Before Tweedledemon and Tweedledumber can stop their hoots of excitement at discovering angel contraband in the back of a Chevy Impala, Vassago swiftly reaches down a hand to Castiel's lower back. He whips it up again grasping the Colt, snapping back the hammer before he turns and sets the butt of the gun over his left forearm to steady his aim. He shoots once, twice. The first demon goes down with the same vapid expression of delight on his face as the woman demon beside him. She has the sense to show fear before the bullet plugs her square between the eyes, and then they erupt into flame, dispersing their energy into the night.

Vassago huffs with annoyance and looks down at the Colt before he returns to staring at Castiel. His face is neutral, his eyes still burning sulfur yellow.

"You understand the kind of trouble we're in?" he says, not unkindly. "Now you just sit tight, kiddo. Hell ain't what it used to be. It _feels_. It _senses_. Especially bright ones like you. It _knows_ you're somewhere around here, so I need you to be quiet inside, okay? Quiet, deep down. Don't be thinking about your sweetheart, you dig? You think too loud, and Hell will find you. And when Hell finds you, you don't get out. Upstarts like Crowley and even the grand master badass Lucy thought they had ownership rights on Hell, but you can't own what enslaves you. So…you be quiet for me, pretty little angel. Huh?"

Castiel wonders if this is a demon who has been tortured for so long he has gone mad, but his yellow eyes give all the indication Castiel needs to know that this is an old one, as old as Azazel and maybe even older. _Azazel?_ he muses then. _Where do I know that name from?_ And the name Vassago tolls that same warning klaxon it did before, but Castiel is so tired he can't remember where he heard it, and most of all he can't remember the one he swore he would never forget.

"Hey," the demon's voice cuts in. "You listening?"

Castiel stares up, nods obediently.

"Good," Vassago grins, and looks at the Colt. "I'll keep this with me for insurance. I'll give it back later."

And he closes the trunk and shrouds Castiel in pitch black again.

Castiel thinks he sleeps, and in the tiny slice of death that is heavy slumber he hears a syncopated, dull thud like an arrhythmic heartbeat far, far in the distance. He dismisses it and sleeps on but it remains, stitching haphazardly through his rest while he drifts, dreaming a jumble of incoherent images. He thinks he dreams of a man who smells faintly of bourbon, a man who sits beside him in this car that transports him and gives him a wry smile as he passes him a bottle. The man has green, _green_ eyes, a faint smattering of freckles over his cheeks and he blinks lazily at Castiel and asks how he's doing, his voice a familiar drawled-out rumble, a patchwork of accents from a splintered life spread across too many states.

Castiel wants nothing more than to cant his head and touch tender lips to the man's, but before he can say this he is shaken awake by the halting of the vehicle. He hears the squeal of rubber as the tires skid across the surface and he rolls in a painful jumble of limbs from one side of the trunk to the other, ending up lying on his back like a turtle, staring up into the dark.

He hears the faint thud sound in the distance again.

He thought it was a dream—

_thud_

—but it beats as steadily as ocean waves crash onto the shoreline, and now Castiel becomes aware of a pounding _boom_ just behind the sound. It is forbidding, threatening, like the footfalls of a giant a thousand miles away from here but drawing closer with every second, and Castiel wants to bury himself in a hole until the sound stops along with whatever is making it.

Running steps patter around the car and then there is a rush of air as the trunk creaks open again and Castiel is staring at someone new.

There is a moment of silence as the man regards him, and Castiel makes out a circle-flare of light around the man's head before it is gone, winked out of existence as the newcomer reaches down and rips away the duct tape.

Castiel winces and licks his lips. "Thank you," he ventures uncertainly, while the man stands there expectantly.

"Well?" the man challenges, and he raises an eyebrow.

Castiel tilts his head quizzically, asks, "Do I know you?"

"Know me?" The man throws up his hands. "Bro. Think harder. It'll come to you."

Castiel blinks. The man's face looks like a malleable wad of silly putty, meandering through any number of amused, bemused, indulgent expressions beneath a mop of brown hair, and he has eyes the color of mud. He waits with an air of patience for Castiel to reach some great conclusion, and when Castiel continues to stare without deducing anything at all, he sighs and reaches into his pocket, withdrawing a soda can with the word Pepsi across it.

Castiel recognizes it from an infinite number of motel vending machines across the lower forty-eight, and finally it clicks. "You're the man from the commercial."

The Pepsi guy's eyebrows arch with dramatic flair. He pops the tab and a hiss of carbonated syrup escapes. "Uh, _no_ , little brother. That's just my vessel, Richard Speight Jr., before a certain spoiled brat of a kid brother killed the both of us and I ended up with a one way ticket to Inferno Island, do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars." He leans down to pinch Castiel's cheek between his thumb and forefinger. "Don't worry, buddy. I'll admit, you weren't the smartest doll off the Precious Moments factory line, but ye olde Highway to Hell can do a number on you."

Castiel knows he gapes. "Vessel…you're an angel." A name surfaces from the depths then, and he clutches after it like a fisherman reeling in a line. It's not the right name, but it feels close, feels right, and he blurts it out without tact or consideration. "Kali."

The man goes still with the aluminum can still clutched in his hand, which flexes to form a fist and then grinds convulsively. Soda jets out as the metal crushes and he lets it drop, staring daggers at Castiel.

"You shouldn't drop litter like that," Castiel diverts. "Are you going to help me out of here or not? And where is Vassago? Why did he bring me to you?"

"Vassago's doing you a solid and risking his neck," Vassago calls out, and Castiel dares lift his head higher to see the demon taking a leak by a stunted tree. All he can make out is Vassago's motorcycle jacket, all zippers and intimidating leather, and a flare of phosphorus yellow where he pisses a line of urine into the ground as the tree blackens and withers under the stream of noxious liquid.

"Still got no reception?" the short man asks Castiel.

"You're an angel," Castiel repeats, and after a moment of trying to parse the concept it occurs to him to ask, "But what are you doing here?"

There is a short but weighty pause. "Fallen angels get the express elevator ride straight to Hell," the man retorts lightly and he taps his temple. "Been—"

"Fallen angels?" Castiel echoes, and he gets a flat look.

"Let's not dwell," the man says, and he repeats the tapping motion and backtracks. "Been on that road for a while, huh? Spacing out? Memory like a sieve? No matter. It just means we get to do everything all over again. My name's Gabriel, you've—"

" _The_ Gabriel?" Castiel queries faintly, and the smaller man preens.

" _The_ Gabriel. You've already met my sometime associate, Vassago."

"I find lost shit," Vassago interjects as he zips up and ambles over, idly kicking a stone across the faded meridian.

Again Castiel hears the faint thud-boom in the background, and it momentarily distracts him. "What's that noise?" he wonders aloud.

"That, kiddo, is going to jog your memory," Gabriel informs him, and when the smaller man winks, Castiel likes it not at all.

The noise sounds again as Gabriel sidesteps around Castiel, muttering something about _Rambo_ and _overkill_ , and leans on the lip of the trunk for a bare instant before he snatches his hand back along to a vibrant strobe of light. His eyes widen as he slants his gaze back to Castiel.

"It's her grace," Castiel explains, and he knows this more than ever now, as he reaches to touch the metal himself. A hazy bluish light emanates from her dusty skin to bathe his fingertips, and again he is caught by its familiarity and comfort.

Gabriel grunts noncommittally, disturbing Castiel's brief reverie as he bends in to heave the weapons duffel out and on to the ground. The angel squats down, his hand streaking into the bag to grasp one of the short, lethal silver blades poking out from the jumbled collection of knives, semi-automatics and crossbows. "You kept my sword," he remarks softly, as he runs a thumb along the edge.

Castiel has no real memory of where any of the swords in the bag came from, but he nods anyway.

The man returns the small gesture, says, "I'm touched." He returns to his examination of the bag's contents, clears his throat in what seems a critical way as he sifts through the interior. "That's quite a killing spree, little brother. Isn't this Rachel's?"

"I…don't really remember." And it's true, Castiel is racking his brain as he stares at the weapons, but there is nothing, just a nebulous fog he can't see through.

"Oh, that'll all come back to you too," the man says. "In fact—" He stops abruptly and Castiel hears a barely perceptible out-breath, sees his shoulders tense as he withdraws another sword. It's different from the others, the blade longer, the hilt covered with intricate designs. Gabriel holds it up in front of him, turns it so that Castiel can see a curved sigil etched into the metal under the crossguard, and he whistles with something that sounds like awe. "I know someone who'll be pretty damned happy to see this," he says, and a wicked smile curls his lips up as he admires the rest of the weaponry. "Sure you brought enough?" he adds dryly.

"The trunk has a false bottom, so there's more ordnance should we need it," Castiel tells him. "I came prepared because I'm here to find – _someone_. I'm just not sure who."

He knows it comes out a little sheepishly, as though this is a matter of remembering where he put the car keys, and after another grin and a wink Gabriel says, "Like I said. We're going to jog your memory."

Vassago pulls his lips back from his fangs as he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a pair of brass knuckles and a knife. "Why don't you hang onto this?" he offers, as he holds the Colt out butt-first.

Castiel takes it gingerly and slides it back into his jeans. Gabriel looks him up and down, the examination critical, and then turns his attention back to the duffel, his eyes narrowing as he pulls out an assortment of weapons. A few minutes later, Castiel is feeling twenty pounds heavier. There are several bandoliers slotted with salt rounds slung around his neck, his crossbow is clipped in its customary position at his back, knives drenched in holy water are jammed into a holster strapped to his thigh, and a shotgun is hooked over his shoulder.

"You look beautiful," Gabriel decides, and he opens the passenger door for Castiel with a theatrical flare, as though this were a date, and the thought sounds like the kind of thing Dean would say.

_Dean_?

Castiel trips over the name, and there is a quickening of images that swirls into nothingness as quickly as they arrive.

"Looks like you almost had it there," Gabriel says. "Don't worry. You will soon. Now get your head back in the game, because letting Vassago get the jump on you like that?" He _tsks_. "Not the soldier I remember."

Just as Castiel is settling into the shotgun seat, there is a shattering noise that sends him bolt upright in choking fear, and he forgets the relentless thud-boom that never quits. When he turns to look, he sees Vassago leaning over the trunk with a tire iron in one hand, and the shattered glass of the Impala's back windshield is sprinkled all over the bench seat.

Castiel is speechless for a split second before a geyser of rage bursts out of him. "What the fuck did you do that for?"

"Better now than when the shooting begins," Vassago informs him through the ragged shards that still cling to the windshield frame. "I've eaten glass. It's no party."

The answer is even more disconcerting than the distant sound, and Gabriel slaps a hand down on the steering wheel, barks out, "Get in the damn car, we've been in one place too long as it is." He guns the engine as Vassago is slamming the back door shut, and doesn't wait for anyone to brace for take-off before he kills the lights, barrels them into motion, and cuts the wheels into a hard right.

Castiel grunts in surprise when he feels the Impala leave the numbing security of the endless highway and dig into soft soil. "Don't we need to stay on the road?"

He gets a decisive headshake in reply, followed by, "You still don't get it, do you? The road's for do-gooders like you. It just goes in a circle, round and round." Gabriel's features twist into a scowl. "It's like driving in New Jersey."

He floors the pedal then, and they rocket forward. It takes only a matter of seconds before Castiel realizes they are heading in the direction of the sound, the sound that is growing louder as they travel, shaking the leaves on the arching trees that are greater in number here in the wooded hinterland, and appear to be closing in and bending over them to scratch and tap inquisitively at the windshield and quarterlights. A shot explodes in the darkness, and Castiel sees Vassago's silhouette in the rearview mirror, cranes to look over his shoulder as the demon leans out the busted back window and fires into the darkness again.

He looks back at the narrow-featured man who stares calmly ahead as he drives, asks, "What's he doing?"

Gabriel waves a dismissive hand. "It's just the trees. Don't worry, this isn't the worst. You should see what happens when we have to use the sewers." He spares Castiel a glance and smirks, an expression that's so familiar it catches Castiel in his heart, though he doesn't know why.

If the man notices how Castiel sucks in a surprised breath, he ignores it. "I keep forgetting you haven't been to this part before," he goes on. "It's not the sort of place you send postcards from. More like the lock-your-doors-as-you-pass-through and keep-your-hand on-your-gun section. The Detroit of the Underworld."

Gabriel turns his attention back to the road again, and in profile it's easy to see that a muscle is jumping in his cheek and his jaw is clenched. It gives Castiel the impression that he's scared despite his bravado and his snarky comments.

Far above the trees is a pale hue of pink, as though the horizon is on fire. A jet of flame spikes into the sky and then recedes, and after a moment Castiel realizes it is occurring in time with the steady thud that has become a _boom-boom-boom_ that shakes the car. Through the window he can see shapes flitting by now; twisted freaks, gargoyles, aberrations that never should be, things with scales and talons and forked tongues, things that he somehow knows are wrong even for this place of the condemned. He presses his nose to the glass to see better, jerks back with a yelp as something grotesque looms up from the half-light. "Why are those creatures here?" he gasps. "I don't think they should be."

"Bad things afoot," Vassago informs him amiably from the back seat. "The planes are coming together, ripping into each other's meat, bleeding their infection into each other's wounds. Like osmosis, and soon there won't be any barriers. Purgatory, Hell… they're becoming one reality, one disease, and the underworld is spilling its bacteria out all over your beloved place of men."

He pauses to let loose a volley of shots, and as the gun blats, the Impala launches into a whirling three hundred sixty-degree turn, Gabriel spinning the steering wheel energetically even as he shakes Castiel off his shoulder. The car pegs three demons at the back end, crushes them under her thundering wheels in a grind of bone and tissue that splatters upwards and curves its glutinous way down onto the trunk lid.

"Jaywalking's a capital offense in my book," Gabriel quips.

Vassago makes a gleeful hooting noise, and when he glances back at Castiel, his face is streaked with ichor and gristle. And then they are plowing once more through earth that might not be earth at all. Where demon blood spatters the Impala's hood, Castiel can see the paint job smoke and singe as it burns away into ash beneath a faint blue-white glow of grace before vanishing. Castiel studies the side-view mirror, finding the view hypnotic. He thinks he sees things buried in the crust of the earth as they blur past, struggling neck deep in mud and waving their many hands. He had wondered what those ominous thumps beneath the chassis were, and there they are, deformed fiends birthing themselves from the poisonous womb of the Pit.

Before long the forest grows patchy, but Vassago remains with his hand white-knuckled on the back seat as he leans out the broken back windshield. Castiel can see him casting his eyes up and around them every few minutes, as if he's expecting something to descend from the midnight sky, and when he catches Castiel's gaze he pulls a face of mock horror. "Here be dragons."

The steady _boom-boom_ grows louder as they breach the treeline and bounce down an embankment before breasting a slight rise.

At the pinnacle of this brief valley, the Impala's headlights dip over what lies beyond, and Castiel sees the mirror surface of a lake. For an instant he thinks it is no more imposing than a resort for older folks looking to take in the air and serenity of the countryside in their twilight years, but for the midnight blackness and the sense of fire close by – and not fire like Castiel knows fire. Vague memories trip back into his neurons, lighting a path through his brain, and he thinks of the green-eyed man who told him about the fireworks he set for his brother. A man who showed him how to flick open a lighter without using your thumb because it was more _badass_ if you did it off the sleeve of your jacket; how to take one apart and adjust the flame so the next person to light a cigarette with it nearly burns off their eyebrows.

_Dean_.

That name again.

Dean understood fire like this, somehow Castiel knows it.

When he looks down across the onyx surface of the lake it seems flat black, but as they draw closer, their proximity reveals more. A ripple disturbs and distends the surface along to the resounding _boom_ , because the sound is emanating from the water itself, and in those fractious ripples small currents of flame erupt hot blue before winking out as though they had never been there at all.

The car rolls to a stop, and the silence within the cabin is broken only by the nightmarish pounding.

"It's on fire, isn't it?" Castiel breathes.

"You remember?" Gabriel asks.

"No. Not…quite." It is there somewhere though, recall from long ago and from more recent times too. "I can feel something," Castiel continues in a murmur. "Familiarity. A memento of this place buried in the back of my mind."

"It doesn't look like it's on fire," Gabriel teases.

"No," Castiel agrees. "But it is, isn't it?"

Gabriel nods, and the mirth is suddenly gone from him. "The blue flames, the heat of the forge." His tone turns almost wistful. "This was earth. This was earth before the surface cooled, before bacteria, before the Cambrian explosion, before those really important fish, before dinosaurs, and before the mudmonkeys climbed down from their trees. This was the earth of the Great Old Ones. The primeval heart of Hell. Can you hear it beat, Castiel?"

Boom. _Boom_. Boom. Castiel can hear it, and he licks lips gone arid. "That's where he is, isn't it?"

"That's where _they_ are," is the enigmatic reply.

"They?" Castiel pushes tentatively.

Gabriel shrugs. "Dean bound himself to Cthulhu and dragged the big guy down with him like a drowning. We all heard it when it happened."

"Cthulhu…" Castiel frowns, chases the name through the murk in his brain as though it will bring everything flaring back to life, and then, like a computer rebooted, he will know everything complete. It simmers beneath the shell of his consciousness, so close, _so close_ …

"This is where we switch seats," Gabriel continues. He doesn't look at Castiel when he says it. He stares over the surface of the lake as though he's mesmerized by the flutter of blue fire that snaps across the top and then recedes. "You have to drive her down, down deep. Strap in and go, and you may as well forget about calling triple A. They don't take calls down here."

Heat, _molten_ , and Castiel remembers it abruptly, remembers how it scalds. "It's too hot," he protests feebly. "We'll burn up. It's not possible."

Gabriel keeps his eyes fixed to the Lake of Fire. "We've got a case of Pepsi to cool us down," he quips, and his lips twist in a humorless smile. "You're right, though. We probably won't survive it. The car might give us an extra layer of protection, though. Her grace and all…who knows? Anyhoo. Balt's been expecting you, but it's _this_ —"

Gabriel leans over to tap his first two fingers against Castiel's chest before withdrawing, and Castiel feels an electric charge of sensation there, where the handprint is burned into his skin.

"—that you need to use to find him."

Confused, Castiel asks, "Find Balt?"

"Dean," the angel corrects. "You need to use that to find Dean. So…ready for the Indy 500, bro?"

Castiel swallows. He thinks, _no_ , and he doesn't even know what he's here for and what his motivation might be when he exits the passenger side almost mechanically, as if Gabriel's words are hiding some spell of compulsion. As they switch sides, Castiel experiences a sparking fragment of memory, armor shining like light through fire and Gabriel's face set as solemn as it is now.

He has done this before, through different means and for a different cause, but the elements are all the same, and Castiel is suddenly serene and ready. He makes himself comfortable in the driver's seat, adjusts the rearview mirror and sees Vassago reflected in it, watching the proceedings with eyes that glow red before their embers dampen to cold obsidian again, and his gaze drifts to the lake.

Gabriel doesn't bother to buckle himself in and he twists, holds his hand out, palm up and flat. Castiel hears Vassago groan behind him.

"Drama queen," the demon growls, and he leans forward to slap something that looks like a rounded shank of bone into Gabriel's hand. It winks, a glimmer of blue-white that flares for a fraction of a second before it vanishes into the ossified surface once more, and Castiel blinks because he has seen it in Gabriel's hand in some other past.

The angel's sharp features are almost reverent as he looks at Castiel. "And storms will rage and oceans roar, when Gabriel stands on sea and shore…"

And Castiel finds that he knows the prophecy, and picks it up. "And as he blows his wondrous horn, old worlds die and new be born."

There is a still moment, a moment that feels like brotherhood, before Gabriel snorts. "I'm supposed to save it for earth, but, meh, what the hell, right?" He reaches a hand out to brace himself on the dash, and his face splits in a smile as he looks at Castiel. "Hit it, kiddo."

Castiel takes a deep breath and when he does the mark in the center of his chest flares like power does on electronics, as though it is one great _on_ button in the middle of him. It begins to throb like a burn when the deep tissue is busy dying, but there is no time to wonder at that now and Castiel fears to remember how he was scarred, or the name of the man who left it there.

He slams on the gas pedal without ceremony.

The pedal sinks to the floor and after a brief hesitation as the old car catches up with the command, the engine revs so hot and hard Castiel wonders if her pistons might break, and her valves blow, and her engine block crack like a nuclear reactor. But the rev reaches a scream and then levels out as the car jolts forward, and Castiel bites down on a cry while everything in him cringes backwards into the surface of his seat and revolts against slamming the car grille-first into the waves.

From the corner of his vision, Castiel sees Gabriel lift the horn in one fist. The archangel's eyes have become burning stones in the center of his face, reflecting the waves that surge across the surface of the lake to meet them. As Gabriel inhales deeply and presses his lips to the mouthpiece, there is a second of time that Castiel uses up deliciously, savoring every micro-fraction of it the way he remembers the green-eyed man, _Dean_ , would savor the best liquor when he tipped a glass until every last drop was gone and sliding down the golden trail of his throat. And then there is a sound that causes a visible shockwave, the air folding and bending around them.

Gunfire rips through the engine's growl as Vassago leans out of the window and begins to shoot a steady _rat-a-tat-tat_ , like a Chicago gangster from an old film Castiel remembers watching with the green-eyed man. The front windshield explodes outward simultaneously with every other pane of glass, and the instrument panels blow, dials spinning in every direction. Castiel can smell burning rubber and a swift glance at the side mirror reveals flames licking out from the Impala's back tires as they hit the water and shoot fat clouds of noxious smelling smoke into the air.

Castiel rocks back in his own private whiplash, knuckles sharp and bony as he grips the steering wheel, and the car is illuminated in white like a halo as they breach the surface. The temperature spikes like a kiln at the highest setting, heat billowing in through the broken window and melting everything with its simmering breath. Gabriel leans over and collapses into the concave of his chest as he blows into the horn with his eyes closed and tears streaming from his lashes, and Castiel can't hear Vassago shooting at anything now.

Liquid fire rises up to meet them and Castiel thinks he cries out, _no_. His shirt ignites with a vicious snap where it meets the mark on his chest, and he slams his hand there to put out the flames. When he does, the jolt is nuclear and he is at the nexus of infinite volts of energy from every dimension, and _memories_ , memories that stutter out from his mind and then speed up to flood him with recognition.

_Of course_. Sam. Bobby. Gabriel. Balthazar. And _Dean-Dean-Dean_.

Castiel leans forward to hug Gabriel into him, away from the inferno that engulfs them. This is what he was made for: the fight, the glory of victory, and he laughs wildly with the centrifugal force of their spin as they submerge and dive full-fathom-five into deep, hot, wet Hell.

The greatest drawback to vessels, Gabriel once said, is that they burn.

And this is what happens – Castiel burns.

All around them is an ocean, and it could be any wild ocean, unplumbed and filled with uncharted mysteries, until it hits substance worth burning – and humans were made for burning.

When this body was born, it was born as James Luka Novak, and later Jimmy Novak invited Castiel's grace into the claustrophobic mortal coil, this thin-skinned, fragile-boned matchbox structure that was marked as Castiel's from the second its embryonic heart first beat. The vessel was both a trap and an opportunity, and Castiel is unsure if there are words in the human language to describe the sensation of wearing Jimmy's body in those first days of walking among men, how intimate it was and yet terrifying as free fall. And so, he feels a sense of grief as fire licks at the edges of his t-shirt and sets the cotton ablaze. The clothing is his shroud now, his mourning veil, in the seconds before it begins to blacken and char. His naked skin lays exposed long enough to begin burning with it, tissues and muscle shriveling away from bone.

Castiel feels the glorious agony of it as though the marrow in his bones has turned to acid, and all the while he is aware of the horizon twisting and turning, of flames buffeting them on every side, blocking out the world around them in a revolving funnel of fire that spins the car round and round, until, abruptly, she lands with a crunch.

Her door swings open and Castiel tumbles out and into a new wasteland of glowing volcanic rock, its mantle oozing thick, molten lava and scored with fissure vents that belch magmatic gases and steam. Ash and the stink of sulfur waft on the wind, and the air is like a dragon's breath, dense with cinders.

For an instant, Castiel marvels at Hell's shifts and fits of structure and reality, at its sheer schizophrenia, at how easily it _turns_ , like a snapping animal; fawning one instant and then striking and puncturing teeth through skin the next. Then comes the _boom_ , resounding in the distance as it did in that other fold of Hell ahead of the lake, and the car shudders and rattles beside him. He turns his head to see a burned husk resting on her rims, her finish immolated to bubbling, ashy-gray base metal. But still the wisps of silvery-blue light that are her grace wander lazily from her wounds and even if she is battered now and ugly, her steel is strong through the center and unbreakable.

Castiel hears Vassago moaning and cursing inside the car, and then his brother erupts from the other side, a shifting shape of bright colors. Only then does Castiel know that he too has been _released_ , and he has been so long growing comfortable in his slow human body, making a home in it, that when all that is left is his grace there is an instant when he is disoriented. But then comes the marvelous sense of liberty, like a banner unfurling on a wind, along to the sound of Gabriel's horn, glowing white hot as a star in the archangel's hand.

Castiel unfurls his wings to the instrument's clarion call, and they beat with a power and fury he hasn't experienced since after Stull, when he was restored so much stronger. He had forgotten their familiar weight and pressure, weakened as they were by Purgatory and his slowly waning strength, but there is no flesh now to pin them down and he feels the widening expanse of himself brushing against Gabriel, brothers matched wingtip to wingtip as Gabriel fills his head.

_You remember now, little brother?_

_I remember. I remember everything…_

Memories jostle for Castiel's attention, images of himself swooping down, his garrison behind him, his grace blazing like mercury and his sword cutting a swathe through Hell's foot soldiers as their dying screeches made sweet music and their smoke formed the scent of victory. He exults in his elemental form, and he feels a quickening inside him; the ruthless ferocity of the hunter-warrior he was and now is again for this struggle. But still the scar he is branded with blazes phosphorescent on his chest, a human touch that etches through to the very center of his heart and anchors him to Dean Winchester. And Dean Winchester is what he wants and longs for, his choice; and he draws his grace in, weaves its silken threads together, stitches his form back into the one he has come to appreciate because Dean loves it.

_You're boring_ , Gabriel observes tartly as he shimmers opposite Castiel, but then he rolls and flexes his shoulders, folds his own grace back inside his vessel. "But you're right," he continues. "Bright ones are public enemy number one here. Silent running it is, or we'll have dragons and leviathans on our six." He glances skeptically at the battered car beside him. "It isn't traveling in style, but at least the sigils should help cloak us."

"I'm not leaving her anyway," Castiel retorts as he slides by his brother. "Dean would be pissed at me."

Gabriel scrambles up and over the hood and settles in beside him, releasing one wing again to shove Castiel over in his seat by several inches. Castiel spits out feathers, shoves back, and hears his brother make an amused snort.

In the next second, Castiel has his fingers around Gabriel's throat. "I strongly recommend that you move over," he growls.

Gabriel smirks. "Watch it, kiddo, or I'll break out the duct tape again. Mister Trickster doesn't like pretty boy angels."

Castiel's flare of irritation sparks a brief, heated slap fight until a shot fires from the back seat, an explosion of noise above the distant bass of the _boom-boom_. Castiel freezes, his fist extended, and the moment tapers from irritation to embarrassment before Gabriel subsides back into the passenger seat. Castiel slants his eyes up to the rearview mirror and watches Vassago holster his gun, his features cast in an expression similar to the one Sam often wears: polite distaste, amusement, derision. A _bitchface_ , as Dean would say.

"We're on the clock, boys," the demon rumbles easily.

Castiel clears his throat, nods towards the horizon. "I assume that's where we're headed?"

At Vassago's nod-wink, he cranks the engine again, takes up the wheel, and eases the Impala forward into the red-hued night. The demon is right, they are on the clock, and as the car speeds up Castiel thinks about why he's here and feels a sharp pang of want and need, laced with a low-level anger. He comforts himself with the thought that he will tell Dean all about it when he sees him, tell Dean how furious he is that Dean tricked him and left him, showed him love only to take it away. He will demonstrate just how furious he is by pinning Dean to the ground and spending several hours in deliciously compromising positions, until Dean gets the message loud and clear.

"We're on the other side of the lake," Gabriel breaks into Castiel's thoughts, and he's his usual good-natured self, the tension forgotten. "We'll stop at the gift shop on the way out so you can ask geek questions about the quantum physics of Hell and pick out a postcard. And you hit like a limp fish, by the way."

A column of flame occupies the distance, and it belches great swaths of fire with each thud that shakes them. Castiel feels an itching trepidation as they draw closer; a fear that weaves through the steady beat of noise, dances in the inferno that shimmies across the empty plain ahead, and ebbs and flows with the hulking shapes that flutter in the darkness just outside their field of vision. But he grits his teeth and plows them on, ignoring the grind of metal on rock, the bounce and shriek as the car crushes something dead-alive under her rims, and the brimstone stink in the air.

The dashboard dial needles are spinning frantically in their housing, so there is no way to know how fast they're going, and grace forms a pearlescent film over the interior, casting them in half-light. Bluish filaments are bleeding up out of the steering wheel, into Castiel's hands and up his forearms, and he imagines that the Impala is a living creature taking on the sentience of Hell, that she breathes out her exertion with each stutter of her engine and plunge of piston.

He urges the car onward, _onward_ , despite his ever-growing fear as he realizes that the column of flame they're heading for isn't mindless combustion at all. It is aware, and Castiel can make out the twisting muscle of an arm outlined in fire, the shape of a huge, horned head. Burned-out, empty sockets that serve as eyes flicker over them and then beyond, and with each step the _boom_ resonates as its heel connects with ground. _What is it…?_ Castiel fears the answer, but he presses the gas pedal down harder.

A lacework pattern of barbed wire formed from warped bones holds the boundary of the monster's territory and the rest of Hell beneath the Lake of Fire, and as Castiel guides the Impala alongside the barrier it grows dense with the flotsam and jetsam remnants of damned souls. They twist and writhe on the razor-sharp barbs, a moaning, groaning wall of suffering, their faces gray and splotched with blood, and their eyes shining flat-black with hungry curiosity even as tears leak from the corners.

Between them, at irregular intervals, there are things that glow and waft in Hell's zephyr winds, and Gabriel sucks in a rueful breath, murmurs, "I will never get used to that."

Castiel reaches for the handle to roll down the window out of habit, before he realizes there is no glass left – it has been shattered and melted away by fire. He leans out and winces at the sight; the torn chunks of meat that will never rot here, gleaming cartilage poking out from the stumps of wings, feathers clinging in puffs and bloody hanks. The wings of his brothers, some of the remains millennia old, dating from the War of Angels and Lucifer's banishment, and some of them more recent, battalions he fought with, lost in the crusade to free the Righteous Man.

Fetid air drifts from the fence, and burns a stripe of slime down Castiel's throat. He swallows it down, grates out, "I don't see a way through."

Beyond, rising up high above the boneyard of suffering and pain, Castiel can make out the fire monster and its changing face. It sways, breaks down and reforms in the fire, and it seems to wink at Castiel from the distance, before it cranes its neck and peers at the ground so far below it. Castiel tracks its gaze, gasps then, because there is a tiny shadow at the monolith's feet, a shadow that somehow withstands the fire, that darts and runs and waves its hands in supplication or defense, Castiel can't be sure – but the knowledge of who it is streaks through every nerve ending.

" _Dean_ ," he chokes through his teeth, and he feels the comforting squeeze of a hand on his shoulder. He spares a glance at his brother, and Gabriel is staring ahead with his jaw clenched and his teeth bared in a wolfish grin, because this is the business of angels and he enjoys his work.

"Soon," Gabriel murmurs, and he lifts his arm, the horn glowing in his hand. He blows through it again, and the shockwave of its sound ripples through the atmosphere. The things impaled on the fence cry out, the tattered souls that retain a semblance of purity shrieking for salvation while others, gone demon with the many years, screech out in agony. And all along the length of the barrier Castiel can see the faint glimmer of latent grace, as though the disarticulated limbs of his brothers are remembering what they once were before they wink out like dying stars.

"Head for the gate," Gabriel says, pointing towards what looks like an immense portcullis in the near distance, and he cocks his head as Castiel brakes the car to a halt in front of the structure. He clasps the horn and his stare is empty, as though he listens on the inside of himself for an answering call. Then the radio dial turns on with a crackle of airwaves, stray frequencies and broken-off voices. Castiel thinks he recognizes some of them before they fade away and another voice replaces them, its enunciation crisp and clear.

"I didn't think you were coming to the party."

Castiel snaps his head around to stare at the radio, and he knows he gasps out the name. "Balthazar? Is that you?"

His question is ignored in favor of, "Gabriel, don't you think that horn is a little outdated in this day and age? We're getting a cell phone tower down here next month."

Gabriel leans forward with his elbows balanced on his knees, intent. "How about opening the gate for us, brother?"

An irritated _tsk_ crackles out of the speaker. "Why should I? I just remodeled. You'll track all kinds of mess in behind you."

Gabriel directs a look of fond exasperation at Castiel, tents his eyebrows. "Time to pucker up and kiss his ass," he mouths.

Annoyance spikes, and Castiel leans in close to his brother. "I don't have time to—"

"I think you better make the time," Gabriel clips back at him. "Since you're the reason he's stuck down here."

The reminder is blunt and painful, backtracks Castiel to Crowley's lair before he opened the portal, and to his paranoia and madness. _We have a Judas in our midst_ , he had said, and it had been him.

"Balthazar," he begins softly, and he pauses to spend a moment composing himself, dips into memories of watching Dean before he interviewed witnesses and victims of attacks, the way he sized up the situation and assessed what mask he must pull on. Castiel hadn't quite understood how the hunter life can toughen and desensitize a human so much they must go to such extremes at pretense just to cull information from others, but he thinks he understands now; understands how the persistent anxiety of thinking about Dean and his welfare might render him intolerant to Balthazar's hurt.

Castiel takes a deep breath and reorients himself. He considers anew what he feels for his wayward brother, a fellow soldier who cared enough to compromise himself when Zachariah's accusations rained down on Castiel. He reminds himself of the moment that put them here on these opposing sides, the slice of his blade, the roar of white-hot light that has haunted him so often during long nights on the road when he lies awake while Dean sleeps beside him. Castiel has regrets, more now than ever before, and he must learn to invite them back in for Balthazar's sake, for Dean's sake, and perhaps for his own sake, to exorcise the ghost of his treachery as well as honor his brother's pain.

"I'm sorry, Balthazar."

The radio clicks on like an inter-dimensional intercom. "Not good enough," comes the stiff reply.

Castiel cracks. The constant booming in the nighttime darkness, the lurking shadow of the monster, the stitching of Dean's handprint that burns hotly over his chest, and his shame combine to shatter him and he slams his fist down on the dashboard, sending a lightning glow of grace rolling and rippling over the skeleton of the car. "Fuck you," he scathes out. "Fuck you, and fuck you again. I'm apologizing and there's nothing more I can do – I can't go back and fix it. And you're here because you're a traitor to the Host. If I hadn't killed you Raphael would have, and you still would have ended up here. So get over your pissy fit, assbutt, and open the gate. Or I'll mow it down."

There is an unconvinced silence after Castiel finishes, and Gabriel pokes him, a gleam in his eyes. "Ever the diplomat," he mocks, before he leans towards the radio. "Balthazar, we have Michael's sword," he reports triumphantly.

Castiel doesn't wait to see if the announcement makes a difference. He hisses a breath through his teeth and jerks the car from park to reverse with a snap of his hand. The Impala skids backwards before he slams on the brakes, and he grips the steering wheel tightly, clenching his jaw. As he fixes his eyes on the closed entranceway ahead, blue-white light floods out of the car's skin and illuminates the moving blockade of souls. He revs the engine, and the car growls obligingly.

Static crackles in on the line followed by Balthazar's voice. "Vigor is always appreciated, but I still don't forgive you. Come in. Though you might regret it later."

There is a sound like a giant wheel turning in a field of gravel before the gate lurches and separates, pulling wide to open a pathway within. Castiel takes a deep breath, drives through the gap at speed, braking sharply as a figure comes bounding from the darkness and stops dead ahead.

Balthazar, and he smacks his palms down on the hood of the car, arms spread wide. "Well you're here now, aren't you?" he declares brightly. "Waiting for cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, perhaps? Come on, come on, we don't do carside-to-go in Hell, you know. You've been on earth for too long and you've been spoiled by that terrible American service industry."

Gabriel curses luridly as he pushes open the passenger door, but he takes a moment to look back at Castiel and offer a crooked grin. "Better get it over with."

There are embers all around them, and as he emerges from the car Castiel can see jumping trails of fire that mark her tracks through the gate. He pays them little heed, stands on guard and alert as he regards his brother, because in truth he thinks that it might be a trick and he deserves no less than to be stabbed in return.

Instead, Balthazar opens his arms in frank greeting. "Brother," he acknowledges, and there is a brief press of hands and a familiar warmth in his smile. He gestures in the direction of a massive building at the center of the compound. "Welcome. Mi casa es su casa. Or rather, Crowley's casa. He left it to me in his Will."

The building is an elaborate mish-mash of columns, ornate flying buttresses, ramparts, towers, and minarets, and a grimace crosses Castiel's face before he can help it.

Balthazar claps gleefully. "I know, I know – it looks like the bastard child of the Taj Mahal and Sleeping Beauty's castle. It's so _me_. And luckily Zachariah agreed and took the beach villa."

They are in the Lake of Fire, where traitor angels languish, and Castiel shouldn't be surprised to hear that his old nemesis is here. But still the news dries his throat, and his response is little more than a whisper. "Zachariah?"

"Oh don't fret, Castiel," Balthazar scoffs. "Zachariah has found his niche. He's far too busy lording it over the northern shore to worry about you. Revenge pales in comparison to a well-developed God complex. But you'd know all about that, from what I've heard on the demonic grapevine." He stops, seems to be giving Castiel a chance to defend himself, but Castiel has nothing to offer and no defense. He looks down at his boots as Balthazar gives a derisive-sounding huff and moves briskly onto Gabriel, his tone becoming urgent.

"You have the sword?"

Gabriel nods, jerks his thumb at Castiel. "The little angel that could is packing it in the trunk."

Balthazar's face falls strangely melancholy in the light of the rising column of fire in the near distance. "Then this is the end, beautiful friend," he breathes. "At last, this is the end." He pauses, runs his hand across his chin reflectively before he nods at Vassago. His handshake with the demon is wary, as though their history extends over less pleasant memories.

"Like old times, seeing all you chaps in one place," Balthazar muses, and then he turns to Castiel, puts a hand at the small of his back and leads him along. "You having the sword is such priceless symmetry, Castiel," he offers, "and I'll show you why."

Castiel allows himself to be guided as his brother continues.

"It's been positively Enochian lately. Everything was perfectly copacetic in the Lake of Fire until a certain hunter turned up on the radar. Came down hand-in-hand with quite a surprise." Balthazar is steering Castiel back to the gate as he speaks, towards an ancient-looking, derelict kiosk that resembles one of the many toll booths Castiel has driven through with the Winchesters. "Judging by Cthulhu's mood swings—"

"Cthulhu?" Castiel gasps it out, the final puzzle piece, and even if the name came up blank when Gabriel spoke it, now Castiel remembers the full horror of what he became, what he did, and what he must do here to set things right again. His thoughts turn panicked, his throat locks, his muscles tense; but underneath his fear, his grace simmers and thrums with a strange joy at the thought of reparation, even if it will doom him.

Balthazar is staring at Castiel when he comes back to himself, and his eyes are frigid-pale and knowing. "Your soul food binge didn't agree with you, did it?" he reproves coolly. "I seem to recall that you were warned about that."

Castiel can't stay locked on his brother's gaze, tracks his vision down to his boots. "I'm sorry," he whispers.

Balthazar clears his throat. "Anyway, I get the distinct impression Cthulhu is somewhat vexed," he detours, as he beckons Castiel to start moving again and strides ahead. "Things have been far too busy here for my taste. I much prefer the French Rivieria."

Balthazar reaches to the door of the booth and hesitates, muttering to himself. He makes a mark and then changes his mind, rubbing it out with his half-curled first before he begins again and makes a scribble of circles and meandering lines. He tugs open the door and a tangle of brooms and mops topples out, along with several rags that go flying off on the sulfurous wind and a box Balthazar flicks his hand out adroitly to catch. "ShamWows. Always useful. These hold twelve times their weight in liquid, you know."

Castiel is mystified and it must show on his face because his brother rolls his eyes. "Keep up, Cas. The chap that does the commercials was one of Crowley's lot." He tosses the box back inside, closes the door, adds, "I keep forgetting that sigil is only one mark away from the one for the broom closet."

He smears away the mark and scrawls a new one, finishing it off with a flourish and stretching his mouth wide in a genuine grin. When he opens the door this time, his triumph is well deserved, and Castiel's eyes widen as he stares inside the dilapidated structure. Flashes of light from the distant fire illuminate the rinds and arcs of burnished gold and silvered chrome, and Castiel's eyes widen as he takes it all in, thinks back to the stories his garrison would share, about the great War of the Angels and the fall of the Lightbringer. "Is that…?"

"The armor from the Fall," Balthazar confirms, and he claps Castiel on the back. "We weren't going to let a two-bit wide-boy like Crowley use it for scrap metal, oh no dear boy. We scoured every nook and cranny of this ghastly place to find it, and tucked it all away for a rainy day. And since you have the sword, it would seem that now is that day." He reaches in past Castiel and plucks what looks like a breastplate off of the jumbled pile. "Time to suit up," he invites, and thrusts the filigreed item at Vassago, who holds it up against himself.

"How do I look?" the demon asks cheerfully.

The metal is stained with a distracting red patina, and Castiel rubs his finger down it. "It's rusty," he says. "You should clean it off. In Star Trek, a red shirt marks you for death. Dean told me the redshirts never make it."

"You must be new," Balthazar interjects thinly. "Everyone here is marked for death."

As if in emphasis, another _boom_ sounds, and Castiel looks off to the distance, where the reflected inferno is casting the sky as blood-red as the breastplate the demon is presently rubbing with his hand.

"He's always noisy," Balthazar explains, as though he's apologizing for a rude houseguest. "But lately it's been frenetic. Frenzied." He flaps a hand. "Back and forth they go. It's been centuries. Property values have plummeted."

Castiel attempts to retrace the thread of time back to the beginning, but the world and earth seem so far away now, with things like texting, and television, and pie, and property values. "Centuries?" he echoes.

"Tempus fugit since that jackass showed up," Balthazar confirms. "Everything's out of whack because he wasn't put down properly. But now we have the sword, the Righteous Man, and the False Prophet…"

He trails off, his eyes frosty again, and critical as they appraise Castiel, but Castiel holds his gaze this time. "If I am to be bound to the Beast to end this, so be it," he says. "I deserve nothing less for my crimes. Just – see Dean out of here safely. Please." He is utterly sincere, and he doesn't think he imagines that his brother's eyes soften in response.

"I'm sure you've earned the full weight of divine justice, Castiel," Balthazar starts, his tone level. "But there's bound to be a loophole. Perhaps it'll come to us in the field. You always were a pragmatist under battle conditions." He twists an arm up behind himself, arches his back as if in discomfort, and adds wryly, "I can still feel the evidence."

Castiel shifts uneasily, mutters, "I have no excuses."

The response is tart. "Then it's lucky I'm so tolerant."

This is the brother he loved and has mourned, and Castiel manages a smile. "I've missed you, Balthazar. I dreamed of you."

He gets a grimace. "Not a sex dream, I hope. The righteous boyfriend would be peeved."

Castiel shakes his head. "You were trying to help me, but you never really told me anything I didn't already know. I think it was my own guilt."

"I should think so, too," Balthazar retorts, but then his features fall serious. "This is our chance, Castiel," he says quietly. "Our chance to atone, our shot at redemption. If Gabriel and I help the Righteous Man finish what he began, perhaps our grace will be unbound from this place and we can ascend back to the Host. And perhaps Raphael may be more forgiving than—"

"Raphael is no more," Castiel blurts out, and the appalling memory of vaporizing the archangel makes him shiver. "I destroyed him after I absorbed the souls. I obliterated his grace from existence on any plane."

Balthazar simply stares back, his lips compressed thin and his expression locked into what looks like a sort of disgusted fascination, before his eyes glitter ferally. "Well, that certainly didn't filter through the grapevine," he murmurs, and then his mouth curves into a sly, predatory smile. "So some good came of your little coup d'état after all."

The guilt still nags at Castiel, plays over in his head right now. "He was our brother."

"He was a piece of work, just like Zachariah," Balthazar counters savagely. "Don't forget why you were fighting your war, Castiel. Raphael ended you once before and would happily have done so again. And I have no doubt that setting Lucifer and Michael free to visit their revenge on the Winchesters would have been next on his to-do list." He raises an eyebrow, adds, "And in any case, from what I've heard, you have infinitely worse crimes to be guilty for." He falls pointedly silent then, because they both know it's true.

The sky lighting up scarlet overhead is a welcome diversion that breaks the moment, and as Balthazar turns his attention back to strapping on his armor, Castiel follows the flash back to its source and recalls the inferno that erupted from the Beast in the vaults of R'lyeh. "So Cthulhu still burns," he murmurs.

Huffing, Balthazar replies, "He fizzled out like a damp squib just after he arrived. But without Crowley here doing his Rudy Giuliani impression, the ship got loose. There were a lot of demons wandering here and there across the countryside, renegade angels that made bad deals and met bad ends. Or, you know – some that just had shitty friends." He flicks his eyes in Castiel's direction at that, and smirks. "Anyway – keggers, rioting, looting. It was like south London in the eighties. Until Cthulhu gatecrashed the party and it turned out he was partial to snacking on our heathen compatriots." He blanches. "Wandering souls, demons with more muscle than brains, Uriel—"

"Uriel?" Castiel gapes, and Balthazar nods.

"Come to think of it, that's when Cthulhu's mood took a turn for the worst," he muses thoughtfully. "But then, Uriel was a grumpy bugger at the best of times. I can imagine he gave our beastly friend a nasty case of indigestion." He flaps a hand. "Anyway, Cthulhu burned off all those extra calories by ripping paths through into Purgatory and wrecking this place from top to bottom. He's torn through every circle, all the way down to the lowest deep."

The _lowest deep_ , the barren, windswept plateau Castiel himself has flown across, and the news of his erstwhile colleague's fate recedes to the back of his mind in the second it takes him to register what Balthazar is implying. He feels a grim and icy chill that would be welcome in the scorching heat if it weren't for his fear for Dean, down here and vulnerable to Michael's persuasion; and for Sam, up in the world and as susceptible to manipulation in his grief as he was before if Lucifer reaches him. "The Cage," he says hoarsely. "Is it still secure?"

It's Gabriel who answers. "That's the sixty-four thousand dollar question." He blows out, and his tone goes somber. "We don't know for sure. We haven't sensed a disturbance in the force, but this place – it messes with you, catches you out."

Castiel knows, sensed the way the place twisted his perceptions, disoriented him and clouded his memories, and he shivers. But he makes himself think it through, apply logic, and consider it rationally. "It's still sealed," he decides, with as much resolve as he can muster, and he forces himself into a state of composure. "Michael is nothing if not diligent in his duties." He motions his head at the distant fury. "If our brother was loose, he would be battling the Beast like he's supposed to."

Balthazar quirks his mouth as he considers it. "You may be right. Michael always was a jobsworth. Anyway…to answer your earlier question, there's all this naked flame down here, as you know, and our friend's diet was richer than he's used to. And, and…" He seems to be fumbling for words, until Vassago chips in.

"One of his farts caught fire and he went up like a torch." The demon smiles a content smile. "It was really pretty, actually."

A singularly horrifying image flashes through Castiel's mind, and, "Sam passes toxic gases in the car," slips out of him before he can stop it. His brothers cast flat looks at him and he shrugs sheepishly. "I hope that never happens to him."

There is a second, maybe two, of thoughtful silence before Vassago throws his head back and brays out laughter, and one by one they join in, Gabriel bending over, his hands on his thighs as he guffaws, Balthazar's face creased up and his shoulders shaking with mirth.

Turning back to watch the landscape beyond the old toll booth, Castiel doesn't join in their merriment. Instead, he maps out the movements of the fiery monolith on the landscape. He assesses and measures, calculates distances and trajectories, counts the steady _boom-boom-boom_ , finally searches for Dean in the rubble at the creature's feet.

He strains to see, and from time to time he spots a distant shadow scurrying across the ground and fading into darkness. He strains to hear, and picks out what he thinks are distant gunshots on the wind, or perhaps it's the sound of crunching bone between a monster's teeth, or the snapping of tendon and sinew as a beloved one is damaged beyond repair. Castiel hates to think of it, and he clenches his fists as the sounds of metal chiming against metal drift into his awareness. He does not care about armor or battle plans, wants nothing more than to run across the burning plains non-stop, until he has Dean in his sights and can grab him by the scruff, _monster be damned_ , and take him back up to the light, like he did before.

Castiel reaches up under his t-shirt for Dean's handprint, and his fingers fall into the grooves like a sword into its sheath. His skin jumps with the nerve endings that tangle there and send a series of sensations tripping over each other: pleasure, surprise, jolting electricity. He closes his eyes and opens up to the feeling while his brothers' voices grow faint. He concentrates, sending all of himself into the search for Dean, and what reaches back to touch him is wordless, mute. What reaches back is a jittery, wide-eyed animal racing from stone to stone and shadow to shadow beneath a blast of heat that scorches and blisters him, and Castiel's heart begins to pound in his ears, blood racing through him as he tastes terror, senses the desperation in the frantic dash. _Run! Dean, run!_ he thinks. _I am here, but run!_ and—

— _Dean reels out from between the feet of the monolith, but this is not a monolith at all because monoliths are not living, and this beast is aware and alive. As Dean cranes his head to look, the flames extend ever upwards into the sky; beneath his feet, bubbling lava broils his skin and sends smoky, stinking fumes wafting up into the air to choke him._

_The Beast is a morass of moving things that make the whole, with faces caught and drowning in its skin, features melting and running into one another over and over, lipless, fanged mouths screaming. It has blazing tentacles of fire that streak lines through the sky where they whip out to find Dean and chase him down, and he is running again, always running and running, dodging and wheeling, zigging and zagging from stunted tree to scarred boulder, until there is no breath, only this choking stench of burning horror that follows him endlessly._

_He is dimly aware that he can't run forever, but the truth of it is there are hardly any thoughts at all, only the struggle for survival. He is gutted, his heart and soul overwhelmed by primal fear, and he is empty of thought and strategy. He is pure instinct, like an automatic weapon designed to blindly fire shot after shot, and all that is left is run-run-run. But still, he raises up his head in the shadow of a massive rock, narrows eyes as black as old motor oil, and sniffs the air as though he can scent Castiel on the wind. His tongue flicks out, one reptilian lick of his lips, and he frowns—_

—"Castiel?"

Castiel draws in a whooping gasp and stumbles the way a man might when he dreams he is falling through space, but Gabriel's hand is on his shoulder, keeping him steady. His brother's face is drawn and concerned and he taps his wingtip against Castiel's shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.

"Hey there, bucking bronco – you tuned out for a minute."

Castiel shakes it off, scrubs the palm he had pressed to his scar on his jeans, because he needs to wipe away that image of something that is Dean but _isn't_. A few minutes must have passed while he was caught in his trance, because his brothers are clad in tarnished metal, and Gabriel is holding a fauld, offering it to Castiel.

"Your fight, bro. Your armor."

Before Castiel can reply, Balthazar is there by his side, gripping his wrist and stretching out the length of his arm so Vassago can clap plates upon him. Gabriel crowds in too, nimble fingers connecting rerebraces to vambraces, and vambraces to the gauntlets that go over Castiel's hands. Castiel is a reluctant puppet, but when he tries to shake Balthazar off or refuse Gabriel's help, he gets a slap at the back of his head for his trouble.

And then it is time for the sword, and Gabriel holds it in his hands reverently for a long moment before he shakes his head. "You were one of his favorites, you know that?" he says, as he presses the hilt into Castiel's hand, and he smiles, a flash of white in the darkness. "Go get him, tiger. Make it right." He turns to Balthazar then. "And if you make it topside before I do, tell Kali I will find her."

Balthazar leers. "If I make it topside before you, I'll be keeping Kali so busy she won't even remember who you are."

Gabriel grins whitely, twists away and bends to hoist a shield up from the ground. Vassago smashes his sword to his own shield, and the clang rings like a bell, a spire of light bouncing from the metal. Abruptly, Castiel finds their motivation infectious and he thinks, _yes, this is it, now is the time_.

He turns toward the Impala with a new energy, and yanks open the door. It comes off in his hand, and he stares at it where it dangles in his grasp.

"Well, that's anticlimactic," Balthazar points out.

"You might want to get that to a mechanic," Gabriel offers helpfully.

"Do we even need it?" is Vassago's contribution, and he unfurls his wings pointedly.

Castiel tongues the inside of his mouth before he casts the door to the ground and imagines what Dean would say. _Shut up_ , followed by a puerile insult pertaining to having sex with oneself. He tracks his eyes over the wreck, her metal glowing vivid, as if she is a pale silver ghost, and he can remember Dean's pride in her as they worked together to rebuild her. _Two hundred seventy-five horses_ , he thinks randomly, and it brings with it a recollection of Eloni Nam'ulu telling them of a white horse, and a rider faithful and true.

"We may not need her, but I'm taking her," he snaps decisively. "She has brought me this far, and it may help Dean to see her when I reach him."

He folds himself laboriously into the driver's seat, his armor clinking and clanking with every small movement. He turns the key, gives the car gas until she purrs, and then skids around into the direction of the monster towering ahead. "Today is a good day to die," he says to his brothers. "I'll race you."

They blink into fractured light and are gone so fast all that remains is the settling of dust as they take flight.

His brothers are on the wing.

They are shapes and shadows in flight; they are warriors, and so is Castiel, and their armor is woven through with grace and the stars, smithed by prayer so old even God would be troubled to remember it.

Castiel floors the pedal again, forsaking his wings for the metal and the churn of the Impala's engine as they head for the mountain of fire that bisects the horizon ahead. His brothers are faster; Castiel can hear their sonic boom as they break the sound barrier, see the arc of a lightning flash as they spark into being again. Their shockwave rolls past him, the car stuttering with its vibration before she picks up speed again. This time there is no cruise control, no steady feeding of gas for even velocity; she is alive, shimmering with grace and greedy as she swallows up the miles. Fire erupts from her exhaust, the tail of it flickering crazily in the rearview and side mirrors, and there is something intoxicating about it, something exhilarating in the way the wind howls through the empty space where the car door should be. "Yes," Castiel hears himself growl out through gritted teeth, and at his bidding the Impala goes even faster, her motion so smooth now Castiel imagines for a moment that she has taken wing herself, and is hovering over a thin slice of air above the broken rocky terrain.

Up ahead, Gabriel, Balthazar and Vassago are a V-formation of bright silver specks before the rising hulk of the monster, and it stretches out fiery tentacles like welcoming arms to pull them into its embrace. It grows as Castiel races closer, jumping in size in fits and starts, like a skipping film reel, like stop-motion photography. It arches and flexes its many-knuckled spine with fluid agility, each knob of bone a miniature Vesuvius erupting sparks and ashes, and in its flesh Castiel can see the faces he saw in his vision of Dean, endlessly manifesting and dying in shapeless agony.

This close, the sound of the Beast's steps can't be drowned out or ignored, and Castiel knows that Dean is somewhere down there, at ground zero. He hits the brake and turns the wheel so that the Impala spirals in a widening pattern, describing circles that leave both fire and traces of white-hot grace in its wake. Falling out of the seat in an ungainly clank of metal as the car screams to a stop, Castiel swallows a mouthful of the yellow sulfur flakes that drift down from the sky like snowfall, and blinks up at the Goliath that lumbers above him, breathing fire at its attackers as they dive and roll.

Balthazar swoops down, his mouth a grim line but his eyes shining with a vicious pleasure, his blade strobing luminous as it smashes into the enraged monster's neck. Castiel sees Gabriel wheeling in around the Beast's other side to slash efficiently at it with his own sword, and a tentacle whips out, smashing into him and sending him tumbling, light rays slanting out where he takes the hit. But Gabriel is fast, lifting his weapon again as he banks, rocketing back into the fray and slicing the tentacle through. The Beast howls, tilting back its head and unhinging its jaw to bellow even louder, and Castiel doesn't want to think about what such a thing might eat that it has a need to unhinge its jaw.

The severed tentacle falls like a column of ash from the end of a cigarette, if the cigarette were the size of a Greyhound bus, and Castiel is thrown up from the surface as it touches down. Vassago lands beside it, runs forward to plunge his sword into it, and the action is as effective as sticking a pin into stone – the blade shatters, and metal shards go flying as though it were made of no more than glass. Catching Castiel's stare, Vassago shrugs and rolls his eyes, and in the next instant a tentacle snaps from above, like a fiery lasso, and snatches him up. His eyes grow round and he shouts, pounds his fist into the sizzling flesh that imprisons him, and then he is gone, up and up and _up_.

Castiel cannot stand to watch, and nor can he wait even if he thirsts to join the fray. He can feel the pull of Dean from somewhere hidden in these shadows and these rocks, can sense Dean's frantic, primal thoughts lost in the demon black, lost in the sulfur and brimstone. He forces himself to ignore the crunch of the Beast chewing on brittle bones above him, reaches to his chest again, and the breastplate grows hot, as if the shape of Dean's hand is being cauterized into the metal itself. _Dean_ , he calls, and he sends the thought out with the force of an arrow, sharpened and cutting through the interference of the fight, the creature's snarls, his brothers' battle cries and the clang of their armor.

Like before, Castiel finds he is tuning into a jumble of thoughts, terrified perceptions and impressions of _now_ , mixed with a shuffle of random images and memories from the past. Castiel tastes Dean's ragged breathing, feels how he tires, and aches, and craves comfort, rest and safety; how he longs for his lover, his brother, an old man he cares for as his own father, his home on wheels, a ramshackle house in South Dakota. And, _over there_ , Castiel realizes, honing in on the cascade of troubled sensation, his eyes scoping the terrain until he locates what he seeks.

Dean is taking shelter behind a rock, crouching on hard-packed desert earth where nothing grows and never will. He is illuminated by the monster's fire, swathed in red and yellow where he squats, and his soul gives shape to all those things that Castiel has so missed and dreamed of, the shape and solidness of _Dean_. He is bare-chested, and Castiel's keen vision can make out mottled purple-black bruises underlying a patchwork of scratches and cuts, and the cruel scars he died with. Dean's soul bleeds out from every wound in a faint white light, the way Castiel's own grace seeped out of him when Rachel sliced into it with her blade, but he is studying Castiel with pitch-black, bottomless eyes that are void of emotion. Castiel reaches out again, finds traces of fright and suspicion, distrust, for this Dean isn't seeing a friend, lover or savior when he looks at Castiel; he is seeing a threat, an assailant, an assassin, _danger_.

Castiel tightens his grip on his sword as he steps closer, but the blade does not increase his sense of faltering security, because he knows he will not use it if he comes under attack. _How have you survived this long?_ he marvels, for in his hurry to get here he didn't stop to consider what toll Dean's second damnation would take. But it has warped into centuries, according to his brothers; centuries of running without rest and without hope. Castiel thinks that perhaps he can give that hope back, and he drops the sword into the dust, exciting a puff of sulfur, and casts his shield away as though it were detritus, before approaching Dean without thought or strategy, holding his hands out palm-up.

"Dean…" he calls softly.

Dean cocks his head sharply and stares at Castiel, unblinking. His tongue flicks out, once, twice, tasting the air like a reptile would, and his shoulders tighten, the contraction of muscle extending down through his frame almost imperceptibly. It's fight or flight, Castiel knows the signs, has seen Dean tense up like this too many times to count, and he realizes he will have to bring Dean back by force.

He allows himself a second of regret and sadness before he explodes into motion, but perhaps Dean can remember the signs too because he is already shooting bolt upright and pivoting into a run, and run from Castiel he does. Fear and centuries of the chase have made him fast and clever, and he darts away, weaving agilely between rocks and trees.

Castiel cries out, "Dean," as he beats his wings and takes to the air, eyes scanning the terrain below him, catching fleeting glimpses of pale skin flashing in the darkness. He slaps his hand to the burning scar heating up his breastplate like nuclear fission, hollers at the top of his lungs, "Stop, Dean! I command you to stop!"

He doesn't think it will work, but Dean jerks back as though he is being pulled by an invisible chain. As Castiel eases himself down to the surface again and furls his wings, Dean's eyes oscillate from black to green, and then black again, because he _is_ in there; buried deep but there.

"Dean," Castiel whispers to him. "Can you see that it's me, Dean? Your friend, Cas. Can you see that I'm here to grip you tight and raise you from Perdition?"

Dean's brow furrows with something that might be recognition, and a hand drifts up to touch its fingers to his lips. And then he slumps, his face crumpling and his mouth choking out a soundless syllable Castiel knows because he has seen Dean form its shape so many times.

Castiel breathes a sigh of relief, thinks, _we can fix this, we can do it_ , and he stumbles forward to take hold of Dean as his friend's arms reach out in welcome, and—

—The crack of the limb that smashes down in between them is like thunder, for it seems the Beast has been waiting for a lapse in concentration and it strikes cobra-swift. Castiel doesn't have time to cry out a warning before the tentacle separates them, setting the land alight as it churns through the soil and snaps itself around Dean's waist, sizzling through the remains of his soul. Weak light shines from the rupture, a slither of fire that opens up Dean's hip and illuminates that delicious uptilt of bone that Castiel has worshiped night after night, tonguing along the point and making love to the flesh with his lips, and then the monster pulls back on the tentacle as if it is fishing line and Dean no more than chum dangling from a hook.

Castiel screams, "No," and thrusts himself forward into flight.

His velocity has him erupting from a tornado of dust and sulfur, but by the time he reaches the spot where Dean was standing, Dean is soaring up much as Vassago did. Castiel follows, and this is the moment where everything moves so fast his consciousness lags behind his instinct. His thoughts flatline while the rest of him calls on resources that have been gradually lost to him in the World as his power wanes, but are somehow restored to him in this moment of desperation; how to rearrange atoms and break apart molecules, to collapse time and truncate it, to call on the elements and fashion weapons from nothing but his grace. And suddenly he is weightless, and time and motion become fluid and transparent as he travels at hyperspeed to take back the one he loves.

He sees Gabriel on his right, a hash mark of burns cutting through his armor and sinking into his grace beneath, but he is still up and fighting, dancing gracefully from shadow to fire and driving in his sword when the monster turns to swat at Balthazar, who beckons and teases it with a come-hither flick of his hand. Balthazar's face is covered in soot, like war paint, but he grins with a flash of white teeth and Castiel can hear his thoughts like a prayer in the ancient tongue, _go-run-conquer-win-victory-will-be ours-brother!_

Dean is there ahead of Castiel now, writhing and tearing at the coils of fire that wind themselves about him, his mouth open in a cry Castiel cannot hear through the roar of the Beast. Castiel makes a desperate plunge for the tentacle, feels its fire burn through his gauntlet and scythe through skin and bone, into his grace. A glow escapes his armor and sears into the Beast's flesh, and despite his pain and horror Castiel gasps as he sees the fire dampen, sees the tentacle split, and suppurate, and shrivel as his light plays across its surface. And, _loophole_ , he marvels, and in that second he remembers that he isn't only a half-man, a hunter, a warrior, a falling angel – he is the False Prophet. _I can help destroy you_ , he thinks, and he tightens his fingers, digs them in while the creature bucks, sends his grace streaming out of his wounds to irrigate the growing split until the limb atrophies, and then Dean is slipping, falling, fading into the half-light below.

Castiel feels Dean's impact on the sand in his own heart, cries out his distress, and then Dean is there in his head, a faint, exhausted whisper, _let me go…no more running_.

But Castiel is rage and fury, he is avenging angel, and he can feel his grace swelling exponentially, his armor stretching to accommodate it, gold, silver and bronze expanding at the atomic level because he wills it so. They will win this battle and win it together, and he focuses, forces his energy into the Beast's flesh for as long as he can while he fixes his eyes on Dean's crumpled figure and roars out words so fiercely he sees them bend the air, "Don't you give up, soldier…don't you dare."

The effect is immediate. Dean reacts to the order like the veteran he is, struggling to push himself up, his fatigue clear in every lethargic movement. But it's too slow, too fatigued, too disoriented, and Castiel knows the despair of seeing another one of the Beast's tentacles snake out to trap Dean again. Dean twists in its grip, scrabbling at the earth for purchase as he tries to stop the monster's pull, and when he raises his fist from the sand and the sulfur he has the hilt of Michael's sword in his grip.

The Beast lifts Dean up into the sky like before, and Castiel does not pause to strategize before he changes course and follows, spinning and rising up so fast the trajectory makes him nauseous. He is tiring, he knows, this final last gasp of grace finally reaching the end of its out-breath, but he calls for more, _more_ , as the massive bulk of the Beast rushes past him, its screaming souls, demons, and monsters nothing more than a blur now.

Dean looms into Castiel's field of vision, staring at the sword in his hand with his brow furrowed, before he is swung away again so fast that Castiel blinks. Dean pinwheels around again, below him now, and Castiel dives to reach for him only to feel a hand at his back, jerking him roughly out of the path of the Beast's claws as it slaps at the air in an effort to swat him like a troublesome fly. Vassago, and he has lost most of his jaw but his eyes still shine with something like amusement before he flings Castiel back into the air and lends him his momentum, pushing strength into him.

Castiel feels his grace swell like a battery charged; he vaults upward faster than ever, so fast he fears he might burn out of existence altogether.

And then, he is there.

The great head of the Beast is all fire and smoke, and its eyes are crimson embers peering through lashes of fire. It is yawning its mouth wide open, showing teeth like gravestones, broken and jagged, and layered as a shark's. It is pulling Dean closer and closer to its gaping maw, and Castiel knows that if it swallows him Dean will spend centuries burning inside its belly until he is nothing but screaming, charred skin on its surface, along with all the other forsaken souls and monsters the Beast has ingested.

Castiel knows that he will follow his lover into this inferno.

He steels himself, prepares to launch himself into the conflagration, but he finds he isn't alone; his brothers are cutting through the air at either side of him, their faces grim as they dive in to heave him back. Castiel thrashes violently in their grasp, cries out Dean's name like he did when Sam held him back from this same moment so long before, but their hold on him is strong.

"Let me go, let—"

"Light the sword, Righteous Man!"

Balthazar drowns out Castiel's protest, his voice a blast of sound, but Dean stares at the flat plane of silver he holds, shaking his head violently. And somewhere beyond the frantic urging of his brothers as they begin pulling Castiel away, Castiel can sense the chaos of Dean's thoughts, his _denial_ , all bathed in flashes of his soul as his heart and his pain slip out of him in this moment of weakness. There is denial of the Beast and his fate; denial of the life that has been a fight when he wants peace; denial of a God who fashioned his fingers to hold a gun, a knife, or a sword, instead of a pen, a tool, or a beloved's hand.

Dean breathes out an exhausted sigh that floods from his mouth in a curl of evaporating steam, the fire of the Beast burning the moisture from the air as fast as Dean exhales it. Castiel sees him mouth the words, _Righteous Man_ , sees the disbelief and lack of self-worth in his tired eyes, and Castiel will not have that.

He slaps his palm to his chest across the scar, forces the thought across the space that divides them.

_You don't have to be the Righteous Man, Dean. You can be your own man. It will be enough…_

It is enough.

Dean's eyes burn to white and the sword erupts into flame.

He can hear them close by, snarling, barking, yelping, baying, howling.

_Son, don't do this_ …

The hounds, it's the _hounds_ , and he fled from them before, with the bleeding soul of the Righteous Man nestled within his grace.

He thinks he whimpers as hands clamp themselves under his arms and he is pulled. It's an almighty heave that sends pain shockwaving through him, and he sobs, tasting ash carried on scorching, stinking, brimstone air. Sulfur burns his gums and the insides of his nostrils, stings his eyes so that he blinks frantically, and his tears turn the flames that leap and dance around him into watercolor patterns of yellow, orange and crimson before the world switches off.

_Flash_ , and his pupils contract painfully.

_Cas? Cas?_

A voice, fading in and out of his awareness. _The radio_ he thinks dreamily, and he remembers how the transmission cut in and out as he drove.

Hands on him, tapping lightly at his cheek.

_Cas? Come on man, you just opened your eyes…_

He's lying flat, on something smooth and soft, too smooth and soft to be ridged leather upholstery. Everything is good, and he isn't compelled to scream out the horror and agony in his heart because it's gone, away into the blackness, even if his body aches all over, and heat still sizzles through his veins, and the throb of his head thuds a regular percussion against the inside of his skull.

_Drumroll_ he thinks. Destiny's drum, a metronome counting down time. Tempus fugit.

_What day is it?_

He peels his lips apart with effort, runs a dry, swollen tongue along his teeth, and attempts speech. "Day…what…?"

Something cool and moist touches his chin, water like nectar dribbled into his mouth, and he swallows thickly, chokes a little.

"Easy. Easy now." The voice is louder now, because this isn't disorientation; someone is here with him.

"Date," he whispers hoarsely. "The date."

There's no answer, just the creak of swift progress across a wooden floor, the draft across his face as a door is opened, and a voice calling. Sam's voice, hailing Bobby, and then the rustle of fabric as he returns. Castiel feels his friend's fingertips, calloused but gentle at his temple, brushing hair away so that a cool, damp cloth can be placed there, and he sighs out the relief of it.

When he cracks his eyelids Sam is staring down at him, his face drawn in lines of stress, dark shadows smudged under his eyes. "Jesus, Cas," he says. "You really gave us a scare."

He's leaning over Castiel, and he moves to straighten, but Castiel lifts a heavy hand and snags Sam's shirtsleeve. "Date," he mutters, with more force now, as Sam cocks his head. "What's the date?"

After a moment Sam says, "The twenty-fourth," and his face falls.

Castiel smiles at him, and it takes some effort to rearrange his features because they feel as if they have fallen into disuse. "Dean," he croaks. "Dean's birthday."

Sam swallows and nods, and now Castiel can see that his friend's eyes are bloodshot and puffy from weeping. "No more tears," Castiel consoles him. "It's Dean's birthday."

Sam is sinking into a chair, and as he pulls it closer to Castiel's bedside the doorway is suddenly filled by Bobby. He looms up, his features as harrowed as Sam's are, his voice gruff.

"Dammit, boy, you should have told us. Your chest is a mess."

He busies himself above Castiel, and when Castiel shifts his head to follow the movement he can see a tube taped to his arm and rising up to an intravenous drip hanging from a hatstand. Bobby is attending to it, and Castiel notices that the old man's hand is bandaged, the fingers taped right up to the tips. He glances down at Castiel, and there is a vein pulsing energetically above his left eye. "We've pumped nearly all the antibiotics we have into you. It was touch and go for a while."

Castiel manages to crane his neck, sees that the sheet is pulled up to his hips, that his chest is bare and his scar is swathed in gauze, that other dressings are randomly scattered down his arms and that one of his hands is bound in a similar fashion to Bobby's. He casts his eyes up again, licks his lips so he can ask the question on the tip of his tongue. "Where is…" He lets it trail off when he sees that Bobby is glowering at him.

"What the fuck do you think you were doing?" the old man demands sharply, his annoyance only barely suppressed. "Of all the—"

"Bobby."

Sam's voice is calm but firm, and it's enough to pull Bobby up. Sam nods at him, looks back to Castiel and awards him a wan grin, but Castiel doesn't mind Bobby's ire because he knows there is love in it, and because he made it back, _they_ made it back. Pure joy bubbles up despite his weakness, and he smiles at Sam, asks, "Where is Dean?"

Elbows planting beside Castiel on the mattress, Sam shields his face in his hands so his reply is muffled. "Don't do this."

Time freezes for a second, and when the wheels crank back into motion, unease is niggling at Castiel. He flicks his eyes back to Bobby, and tries to ignore the sudden feeling of disquiet as he studies the drip and filters what Bobby said through his mind. "How long since I got back?"

Bobby's eyebrows are tenting with what seems to be bewilderment, so Castiel tries again, husking the words out as clearly as he can. "How long since I got back?"

"You didn't go anywhere, Cas."

It's Sam who answers his question, weary and resigned; a simple phrase the weight of which makes Castiel feel suddenly unsteady and lightheaded with a wave of nauseating vertigo. It makes the room pitch and yaw crazily for a few seconds before it settles back where it should be, and he hears, "How long have I been back?" hiss out of him insistently, and then, "Dean…where is Dean?"

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose, echoes what he just said. "Don't do this, Cas, please. You know where he is. Don't do this."

But Castiel will do it and does do it, as hysteria rises inside him. "How long have I been back?" he persists. "How long since you found me? How long have I been _here_?"

Flustered, Sam scrubs a hand through his hair. "Here? I don't know what you—"

"The bed, how long…" The room is spinning again, spots are dancing across Castiel's eyes, and he shakes his head blindly, so that the pain inside it buffets him. It wasn't a dream, it can't have been. "How long?" he pleads again. "Where is Dean?"

Sam is still uncomprehending, his expression crumpling into sheer dismay, and it's Bobby who barks out a distressed admonishment.

"Stop this now. I found you yesterday. You're damn lucky you set the dogs off…and Dean is dead, you know that."

_They don't know_.

It comes to Castiel in a bright and terrible starburst of clarity: they don't know because Dean wasn't in the car with him when they found him. And it makes perfect sense, and how could he have been so stupid, and it has been a whole day, and, _no-no-no_.

He wants to moan, but he sucks the sound back in, gropes for Sam's sleeve again, and tugs at it. "Dean, you have to get Dean," he gasps, while Sam stares at him with hurt eyes that don't understand what Castiel is telling him. "Birthday, it's his birthday," he tries, and now Sam grips his wrist in strong, determined fingers while his vision tracks anxiously up to Bobby and back again.

"I know that, Cas," Sam soothes, "but—"

"I wrote it all down for you," Castiel cuts in. "My journal…I wrote down my plans, and I drove for years, I drove into the Lake of Fire for him…love is stronger than death." And there isn't time for this, it has been _a whole day_ , and Castiel surges up even as Bobby makes a frustrated noise and puts a hand on his shoulder to keep him in place.

"Steady, son, you—"

But Castiel is desperate, thrashing against Bobby's hand, and his voice goes thin and jagged in his panic. "It wasn't a dream, Sam, I found a door, a _door_ , because love is stronger than death, because…" His thoughts are speeding up now, too fast for him to speak through his slow, tired mouth, _because when one door closes another one opens_. It was _meant_ , and the final puzzle piece the Dragon King gave them is right there waiting to complete the big picture. But Sam is looking up at Bobby and shaking his head, his eyes bleak and frightened and his mouth pursed into a thin line.

"The trick to finding things you've lost is to look where you last saw them," Castiel almost-shrieks, and Sam's head whips back, alight with curiosity and a glimmer of recognition.

"Fortune, it was your fortune…" Castiel sobs, as Sam's brow corrugates into a frown. "It meant something…and I went back, I wrote it all down for you…my journal…"

The book is right there on the nightstand, and Castiel waves a hand over towards it, hearing his words go faint and faraway as he speaks, but his vision is starting to tunnel, _Dean_ , inky blackness spreading from the outside.

_It means fate too_ , he thinks. _Fortune means fate too._

The beep on the thermometer sounds, and the display tells Bobby the angel's fever has gone down even if he's still burning as hot as the car Bobby dragged him from. "Least he isn't seizing any more," he thinks aloud, as he tries and fails to flick one of his wrapped fingers against the barely full drip, wincing at the sting of his burns. "He's not out of the woods yet though. Hope Mira finds a hospital that hasn't been looted, because we only have a couple more of these."

Castiel is a mess, and it makes Bobby shudder to think he might have chosen that way to do it. He can still hear the greedy lick and slurp of the flames, and he can't get the smell of the inferno out of his nose, the acrid stench of burning rubber that had his head pounding for hours afterwards, the toxic smart of chemicals that still blurs his vision. He stares at his hand, cauterized right through to the phalanges when he gripped the door handle, and he curls his fingers in and then straightens them with difficulty. He wonders if he'll ever be able to use them properly again, and not for the first time he thanks the Maker it isn't his gun hand.

"What the fuck was he doing?" he marvels again, and his good hand falls to rest on Castiel's shoulder, grips the bone as if to anchor him, as the awful moment when he realized there was a man sitting in the car and it could only be Castiel hits him again. He shakes with the delayed shock of it. "Jesus. I still can't believe he'd do that."

"Maybe he didn't."

Sam sounds absent, and when Bobby glances across at the other man, he is indeed preoccupied. He has Castiel's journal in his hand and he's studying it intently, eyebrows drawn low, as he chews on a thumbnail.

Bobby snorts. "You're not reading anything into any of that are you? He's delirious, he—"

"Found a door," Sam cuts in softly, and he's standing up slowly, what little color he had draining from his face. "Oh my God," he whispers, and his hand floats up to cover his mouth as his eyes go huge and round with something like horror. It's alarming to say the least, but Bobby doesn't have time to press further before Sam whirls around in an explosion of windmilling arms, and skids across the room and out through the doorway.

"Balls," Bobby grates out to the unconscious man in the bed, and he doesn't spend more than a minute debating what to do before he follows Sam's thunderous progress down the stairs and up the hallway.

A crescendo of midnight barking is starting up as Bobby gets to the front door, left swinging open and unattended, and his breath is a plume of mist in the chill January air as he scans the lot. "Where the hell is he…"

He trails off as Sam sprints back around from the back of the house, knees almost hitting his chin as he runs because his legs are pumping so fast and hard. He's carrying an armload of tools and a flashlight, and he's trailed by an excited pack of dogs springing and bounding to join in the game. He swings his head around as he goes, hollers at Bobby.

"He found a door, the same door we did. It's in his journal. _Fuck_."

Bobby looked at the journal himself, when Castiel showed him a list of unconnected words and phrases that he claimed were _significant_. The memory is vivid, Castiel's eyes trusting and hopeful as Bobby scanned a spidery, haphazard scrawl of nonsensical, arbitrary ramblings and realized in that moment that he couldn't deal with the scope of Castiel's grief even if he wanted to, just like he couldn't deal with Sam's or his own after New Harmony. "It was crazy talk that made no sense," he mutters under his breath, but still he's mystified and unsettled as he stumbles after Sam.

When he sees where Sam is headed, Bobby's guts contort inside him so aggressively he thinks he might shit his pants right there. "Oh, no…no, no, no," he gasps out, and now he's running himself, lumbering along as fast as an old guy who hasn't had a square meal in six months can, running right up behind Sam and barely dodging the backward curve of the pick ax as Sam brings it around and down into the topsoil under the tree.

Before Sam has the chance to go at it again, Bobby fists a handful of his shirt, pulls him around all the way. "What the fuck are you doing?" he yells, but Sam is already slapping his hand away, turning back. Bobby can't let this happen, and he steps around Sam, throws an arm up to deflect the other man's swing, plants his good hand on Sam's chest and pushes him hard. "I can't let you—"

The blow crunches squarely into Bobby's jaw, sending red-hued pain slamming through him, and he can taste copper as he tumbles back onto his butt. There is a moment when he sees stars and the lot gyrates crazily, and he coughs, spits blood as nausea has him retching, and wipes his hand on his sleeve. In the background of it all, he can hear the solid thud of the pick ax into earth. "Please don't do this," he wheezes, but Sam is hooking up a shovel with his foot and tossing it over to land next to Bobby.

"Dig," he orders tersely. "We can't use the backhoe, it could hurt him."

Bobby can feel horrified tears pricking his eyes, doesn't want to do this, doesn't want to look at what Sam seems intent on uncovering. "You're going to listen to a madman who just tried to cremate himself? Son, please, we—"

"It was Cas's fortune," Sam interrupts, and his face is set and his mouth is grim as he slams into the ground again. "One door closes, another one opens. It's in the journal, all of it, the door, the key…we missed it, all of it. He didn't have enough grace to pass into Hell, so he found a door he had a key for." He spares Bobby a glance. "You said he was holding the Colt when you found him."

_The Colt_. Castiel had been holding fast to it when Bobby heaved his limp form out of the blazing car, and it slots into place. "You think he opened the Hellgate," Bobby croaks, but even if it's the most obvious conclusion it doesn't fit. "But that doesn't make sense. He can't have driven to Wyoming."

Sam grunts out confirmation as he arches his back and pounds the soil. "I know it doesn't make sense," he ekes out between pants as he works. "But dig. Because it's been a whole fucking day."

Bobby shakes his head, protests again desperately, "But there's no way, he can't have—"

"It's Dean's birthday. Now _dig the fucking hole_."

Sam screams it at him with such force that Bobby feels spittle fleck his cheeks, and for a moment he's caught in a memory of being roped to a chair, begging for his life while the soulless monster wearing the younger man's face studied him like he was a clinical specimen and hefted its blade. The shock has Bobby blindly complying, and he fumbles for the shovel and staggers upright.

The loam is still relatively loose-packed, gives under the blade without too much effort as he uses his foot to lever it in, and they fall into an effective if reluctant partnership, Sam reaching tall, curving his lanky body around for the swing and pistoning down with such force Bobby can feel the shockwave of it through the soles of his boots. He feels sweat break out and start to soak his shirt, can see that Sam is already drenched, his hair plastered to his face in wet hanks as he keeps up a relentless pace.

"How deep?"

Sam doesn't look at Bobby as he snaps out the question, keeps hacking at the earth to loosen it so Bobby can scoop it up and pitch it away.

"Son, please," Bobby broaches again. "You don't—"

" _How deep?_ "

The ground had been frozen so hard even the backhoe bucket found it tough going, but Bobby had gritted his teeth through the blur of tears, had forced the edge down through the permafrost for two hours straight to dig out a trench large enough for the canoe and deep enough so that his boy could rest in peace. Mira had silently helped him maneuver the Trapper down into the grave, had pressed her cold hand to his cheek for a moment, and walked back into the house while he sank to his knees, clutched the body to him and wept.

He shakes the memory out of his head. "Five feet at least." Out the corner of his eye, he can see that a couple of the younger mutts in his pack of guard dogs have ranged closer and are joining in, paws slapping energetically at the soil. Every half-minute or so they pause to bury their noses deep in the holes they've excavated and snuffle in smells Bobby doesn't want to think about.

"There should be air pockets," Sam labors out. "Disturbed soil has air pockets that don't close up for weeks. And the Trapper was way big for him. So if he didn't panic…"

Sam is showing no signs of faltering, and large clods of earth are jouncing up every time the spear of the pick ax impacts the surface, but it doesn't seem to be enough. He curses incoherently, flings the tool to one side and snatches up the other shovel, starts ramming it into the rapidly deepening depression in the ground. They're in the grave up to their knees now, and Sam's pace is still frenetic, his eyes wild and staring, the muscles of his arms corded rigid with effort. "We need Mira back here, _stat_ ," punches out of him, and he heaves a wet, sobbing breath in before he follows up. "You'll have to get her on the CB if you can."

Bobby doesn't answer because he's weighing up the odds of serious injury if he clips Sam on the back of the skull with his shovel, and as if Sam is reading his mind he mutters out a subdued defense.

"I know you think I'm crazy, but it's all there in the journal like Cas said."

Bobby can't help an unimpressed snort as he throws earth over on the growing pile at the graveside. "It isn't possible," he snarls, and right then, he hears the dull clunk of Sam's shovel on wood, and Sam lets out a gasp. In that instant, Bobby knows he's done here. "I won't be a part of this any more," he says through clenched teeth, as he turns and clambers up the shifting sides of the hole.

"But Bobby—"

"No."

Bobby puts a shaking hand up to pull off his cap, and he presses his forearm up to his eyes to hide from it all for a moment. "This is wrong," he grinds out. "You're asking me to help you do this, and who the hell has to clear up the mess afterwards? _Again_." He stops for a moment while Sam stares up at him, eyes huge and inky in his pallor, and then he loses it, roars out his own anger and grief for the first time. "Near thirty years worrying about your brother and you, thirty fuckin' years of feeding you, housing you, nursing you, stitching you. I was the first person your brother spoke to after your mother burned, and he hadn't said a damn word in months. And after your dad dumped you and him here, it was me who got up to him in the night when he hollered for her, me who rocked him back to sleep. I pulled his first loose tooth, I taught him his letters and his numbers, I played catch with him when your dad wanted him out doing target practice. And you expect me to do this to him? _No_."

Sam is dumbstruck, mouth hanging loose, so Bobby plows on, scrubbing tears from his cheeks with his sleeve. "You think I'm going to stand here and watch you haul out a rotting corpse, and then clean up yet another fuckin' Winchester mess. _But no_."

He flings his shovel down to the ground, takes a few angry, stiff-legged steps before he spins back around and gestures at the house. "Him, he's still alive, even if he is so far gone he'd set the fuckin' car on fire with himself in it. That's what matters to me. Him and you. You're all the family I have left, and keeping the both of you breathing is what matters to me now. It's all there is. So when you've finished this, _you_ clean it up. And then I'll just go on trying to keep him and you alive."

Bobby doesn't wait for Sam to respond, he's moving again, almost without realizing it, striding back through the lot, his memory taunting him with a thousand images of the child of his heart, and he won't sully them with whatever Sam disinters tonight. His dog is by the porch, and it directs disapproving liquid eyes on him as he approaches, griping out a sound that's part whine and part-sigh. "What the hell do you know?" Bobby chides it, as he stomps up the porch steps and into the house.

He clumps his way into the study, fishes in his desk drawer for a bottle of Wild Turkey, one of a case that hitched a ride back on a supply run even though Mira narrowed her sloe eyes and spat, _jebena seljacina_ at him when she saw it in the truck. After she had a couple of shots herself she told him it meant _fucking hillbilly_ , which he thought was appropriate. The liquor screeches across the split inside his mouth, where Sam's fist sent the skin slamming into his teeth, and he winces.

It's been…five minutes at least since he turned tail and ran from the grisly scene unfolding out in the lot, and even as he's steeling himself for the first cries Bobby hears them, rising up into the night outside the open door. His uneasy stomach rebels and folds itself inside out, and he has to fumble for the trashcan under his desk. The liquor is eighty-proof coming back up too, and has water stinging his eyes again as he hoiks up bile.

He fists his hand, rams it down on the desk so hard he wonders if the bone might have shattered. "Damn," he hears himself choke out, and he thinks that dying would have been so much easier than this. "Damn it all to Hell."

Sam is kneeling on a four-foot square patch of uncovered wood now, scrabbling away damp, stinking earth, and there is the seam between two of the lumber strips he can vaguely recall thinking would make a good cover for the Trapper. He squeezes his fingertips down into the gap, exerts as much force as he can, but nothing, they won't be budged, and he cries out in frustration and rockets upright.

"Bobby!" he yells in the direction of the house, and he hammers a fist down onto the ground at the graveside. "Dammit."

But it's _his_ turn now, _his_ fortune that's at stake here. And love is stronger than death, and he still has his hope and his sheer willpower.

He snatches up his shovel again, wedges the tip of the blade down into the crack, levers it back and forth and further down even as he tries to calculate how much clear maneuvering space might be under there. "Just knock on wood if you can feel this, Dean," he shouts. "I don't want to hurt you." He stamps a boot on the rough surface. "You hear that? I'm here. So hang on. Just – just hang on, Dean…"

_Push_ against the shovel handle, and Sam is doing it with as much force as he safely can, easing the blade further, and he can hear its metal grinding, thinks maybe something shifts under him. More pressure, shove, and he can feel tears starting in his eyes. "I'm here, Dean," he mutters. "I won't let you down, I'm—"

The noise of the handle snapping is like a pistol shot in the still of the night and Sam crashes down onto his ass, pain shooting up his tailbone and spine, the impact jarring his teeth. "Fuck," he grates out as he flops forward onto his hands and knees and puts his lips to the nook between the strips of pine. "Dean," he says, and he twists his head, lays his ear to the wood. "Can you hear me? Dean?"

Nothing, and Sam bricks up the dull wave of despair that threatens, pushes up to glance around him. The space he has cleared isn't big enough, he can see, thick drifts of soil are still piled up and there is no way he can shift the cover, weighed down as it is. It will take an hour at least, probably more, to clear a big enough space and it has already been a _whole day_.

Sam's mouth opens and his anguish comes out of him in a harsh cry as he slams his palms down onto the wood. "No, fuck. _No_. I won't. _No_." But every instinct in him is telling him to keep doing this, and he will do it with his bare hands if he has to.

He scrapes and claws tenaciously at the loose soil, digs into the wood, feels his fingertips rip and tear, feels his nails catch and split, feels splinters stab viciously into his skin. He feels a niche, a gap, the butt end of a plank of wood, hooks his fingers under it and hears the pop of his knuckles as he closes his eyes, blows out, and grits his teeth. _Dean_ he thinks, and suddenly he can feel it flood through him, something darkly familiar, a vigor and vitality he hasn't felt in years exploding out from some closed-off part of him. _Power_ , and it courses through him, the brutal, inhuman strength that always made him feel invincible; and the barrier between him and his brother is suddenly so flimsy it fractures and disintegrates into matchsticks.

The thick miasma of rot and decay that buffets him makes Sam gag and cough, and he slaps his hand up against his nose for relief. He blinks away sweat and tears, peers down in the dim glow cast from above by the flashlight, puts down his other hand. There is cloth, rough to the touch; a blanket, because Bobby must have wrapped the body before he laid it to rest. "Dean?" Sam whispers, and he prods the body cocooned in the fabric.

Nothing, no sound but Sam's own breath, no movement but his own anxious tremor. There is just the stench of death, and the swift scurry of an insect across the back of Sam's hand, because insects feed on the dead. "No," Sam chokes out in painful disbelief, because he had been so oddly sure of this. "Dean. No, God, no. De—"

He is cut off by a dull, low noise, a forlorn animal whine that disorients him for a split second before the body under his hand jolts sharply and erupts out of the makeshift casket. And the sound is coming from Dean, _Dean_ , and it's a desperate, desolate dirge, and Dean is a flopping, shaking, panic-stricken wild thing that might not even really be his brother any more. But even through the daze of shock and bewilderment, Sam is reaching for him, pulling him in, wrapping his arms around him and rocking him against his chest, while he hollers for Bobby.

The shouts are echoing in from outside, frantic, Sam calling Bobby's name, and the dogs are taking up the chorus. They howl plaintively in time with Sam's clamor, and Bobby sighs deeply, screws the cap back on the liquor bottle. _Clean-up time_.

His mouth is cotton-dry, a band of pressure is squeezing his temples together, and his back is already aching from digging. His legs are slow and unwilling as he makes his way back towards the tree that looms up ahead of him, and he can hear Sam sobbing in between his calls, hear the awful, guttural mantra of horror he knew he would hear at the end of all this.

At the lip of the grave he stares down, and in the moonlight he can see that Sam is cradling his dead brother in his arms, hunched over him and talking in a soft, low voice.

"It's alright, boy," Bobby soothes, and he steels himself for what he's going to see, a facsimile of the countless maggot-infested bodies he has salted and burned in three decades on the hunt. "I didn't mean what I said. I'll handle this, but you—"

Sam's head snaps up, and his features are shining wet but they are more bright and alive than Bobby has seen them in weeks. "Mira, you need to get her on the CB," he croaks. "And I think we need to get him inside to be with Cas. I don't think he knows me."

But Bobby is lost, rooted to the spot, his heart juddering to a dead stop and his voice petrified and useless on the back of his tongue, as he stares at Dean, _Dean_ , slumped against Sam's shoulder, blinking slowly, his hands out ahead of him and scratching restlessly at thin air as he moans.

"Bobby," Sam says again, gently enough to cut through Bobby's stupefaction better than any shout would. "You need to help me. I don't want to do anything that might spook him."

Sam is already shifting to get his feet underneath himself, easing himself and his brother up. Still speechless, Bobby nods, squats and slides himself down the crumbling earth bank until he's standing next to Dean and Dean looks right through, past and beyond him. He's shivering, making a strange clicking sound that Bobby realizes is his teeth chattering violently. He looks slowly away, to Sam. "What did he do?" he whispers finally, so thinly he can barely hear himself. "What did that crazy damned fool angel do?"

There are tears glistening on Sam's cheeks, and his teeth flash white in the darkness. "Love is stronger than death, that's what he said."

Dean's legs are boneless and buckling under him and Sam groans as he braces to take the extra weight. The smell of rot is strong, and Bobby reaches out a hand, touches cold, clammy, dirt-streaked flesh as the ragged blanket he used as a shroud falls away. "This isn't right," he says, and his eyes flick up to Sam's again as his instincts grind back into motion. "This isn't right," he repeats, tense now even if he desperately wants to _believe_ , even if the nausea twisting his guts into a reef knot is undercut by joy. "He could be a revenant. Or a demon." He can't help moving closer though, pressing a hand to Dean's chest to feel the rapid thrum of what sounds like a live, human heart doing panic-stricken overtime. "Vade, Satana," he says anyway. "Inventor et magister omnis fallaciae…"

There's no reaction except for the glower Sam directs his way. "We need to be sure," Bobby defends.

After a second of consideration, Sam concedes. "We'll do the tests. Silver, holy water."

They're moving towards the house now, slow, shambling steps as Dean shudders and lurches between them in a way that makes Bobby think of Romero zombies, his feet tripping and dragging on the soil. He loses his legs again, makes a harsh sound of distress, his head lolling forward onto his chest, and in a swift fluid move, Sam is bending and scooping him up into his arms. Bobby's breath catches in his throat at the sight, because he's looking at a mirror image of what he looked at when they materialized out of nowhere three weeks before, and it's as wrong now as it was then.

Now they're closer to the light from the house Bobby can see that Dean's eyes are vacant, unfocused and wandering aimlessly. "I don't like this," he mutters as Sam makes his way slowly up the porch steps. "He wasn't like this the last time."

"He wasn't buried alive in his own coffin for a whole day the last time," Sam grunts, turning sideways to slide them in through the door. "And Cas was stronger then. Maybe he didn't have the juice to fix him up as well this time."

That opens up a whole new can of worms for Bobby, as he maneuvers past Sam and his armload and drops to his haunches to root through his backpack for what they need. "How do we know he isn't like you were?" he pushes, even if he doesn't want to think it. "How do we know Cas didn't screw it up this time too?"

Sam blanches as Bobby rises. "I'll know. Maybe not until he's compos mentis, but believe me, I'll know."

It's all they have right now, so Bobby sidetracks to what they can do. "Holy water first."

Sam nods, braces as Bobby unscrews the cap of the flask, tilts it and drips the contents in through Dean's lax lips. Dean flinches, _God, no_ , before Bobby knows the relief of seeing the tip of his tongue poke out to lick at the water. "Easy, son," he croons gently, as he tips the flask up again, dribbling more of the water into Dean's mouth as he gulps the liquid greedily.

"The knife now."

Bobby glances up to see that Sam's eyes are watchful, his frame taut and ready even if the first test is done and his brother passed it with flying colors. He nods, tugs his shiv out of his hip pocket. He made it himself and the blade is pure silver, the edge vicious. "Jesus," he mutters as he lays it against the flesh of Dean's arm. "He stood here three years ago and did this to prove he was clean."

Sam's reply is parched. "Just do it."

Blood springs, bright scarlet beads of it, but Dean is still oblivious, his eyes still spinning in their sockets. "It's him," Bobby manages. "Christ, it's him, I think it's him…"

Sam is already pulling away, heading for the stairs. "I think he needs Cas," he throws back over his shoulder, somehow assured and calm. "We'll get him cleaned up later."

It takes several minutes for Sam to reach the top, Dean's arm swinging languidly just ahead of Bobby's face as they climb, and Bobby dodges around and ahead once they get there, pushes open the bedroom door. Castiel is where they left him, perfectly still, and Sam groans as he bends over to lower his burden down onto the bed next to the angel.

"He's in shock. We need blankets." Sam glances back. "Bobby."

Bobby shakes himself, crosses to the closet and starts pulling out quilts as Sam starts maneuvering the jeans down Dean's legs. Once he's stripped down to his boxers, Sam tugs the bedclothes down from under his brother and covers him, Bobby spreading more bedding on top of the pair.

And it's done, and in the space of an hour everything has changed, whether for the better or not Bobby has no idea.

Sam moves to stand next to him, and he huffs out a laugh that might be horrified. "What did he do?" he says, and it's an awestruck echo of Bobby's own incredulity out at the gravesite. He puts his hand up to his mouth, his composure draining away suddenly, and he reels on his feet so that Bobby has to reach for his arm.

"Steady, boy."

Bobby hooks the chair with his other hand, drags it up behind Sam, and Sam slumps into it, his eyes still fixed to his brother in the bed. "I don't believe it," he mumbles. "I don't believe it."

A drink is what the boy needs, Bobby thinks, and they need to get fluids into Dean. But there's something he needs to do first.

He rounds the end of the bed, and treads softly up to the head end, sits on the edge of the mattress and puts his hand on Castiel's shoulder. "Cas," he whispers, giving the insensate man a gentle push, and then another, until he groans and his eyelids crack open. "Cas, you with us?"

Castiel blinks at him a couple of times, slurs, "It wasn't a dream," as pain floods his eyes and his face falls back into grief.

Bobby nods. "We know, son," he says. He doesn't know how he gets the words out past the swelling in his throat, and anxiety might be dancing a jig inside him, but he smiles through it even though he thought he had forgotten how to smile. "Look. You stupid goddamn angel, look. Look what you did."

After staring back at Bobby long and hard, and puzzled too, something seems to dawn on Castiel's face. He frowns, twists his head to his left, and freezes for an endless moment before his features relax.

He doesn't speak, starts clumsily shifting himself onto his side, and Bobby splays his hand out on his upper back to support him in the maneuver as Castiel slides his palm across Dean's chest to fit it to the handprint scar that still mars Dean's skin. He dips his face in to press his mouth to Dean's shoulder and sighs quietly, a miniscule expression of relief that sends his whole frame sagging and settling against Dean as he closes his eyes again.

Bobby isn't a sentimental man, but he finds he's blinking hard and biting the skin inside his cheeks as he stands and glances over at Sam, sees that the younger man's expression is still dumbfounded, his jaw slack.

"I guess now we wait," Bobby manages.


End file.
